Sunday, April 12, 2009

Amazon Rank

I have just learned of this unfathomably stupid move by Amazon.com involving the removal of GLBT themed and straight erotica novels from their ranking system and also their search feature of their site. What the hell Amazon? The folks at Smart Bitches Trashy Books have created a new, more accurate definition of Amazon Rank and have asked bloggers to get the word out. Their definition is now the first result when googling Amazon Rank which makes me rather pleased.

There is also a hashtag on twitter for this ridiculousness #amazonfail. I sincerely hope all this negative attention will get the folks at Amazon to reconsider their recent actions. They claim to be protecting the public from things they may not wish to see, but completely eliminating the existence of an entire subset of genres from the largest online book marketplace is not the way to do it. Particularly since they've only eliminated erotic books from their searchable products. There are plenty of other erotic items for sale that can be searched for.

I'm not sure that putting some kind of warning or marker on erotic novels is a wholly bad thing, however, removing them entirely from the searchable database is completely ridiculous.

Anyway, that is my own two cents.

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