Amazon fuckwittery

[rogin]

I think by now everyone on my flist has heard about the big time amazon fail. So I'm just adding my voice to the many here.

Amazon started to exclude adult material from their sales ranking. Only that they define adult by gay/lesbian since mainstream het porn like that is still in the ranking but self help books and inexplicit gay romances are pulled from the ranking.
This is what you get if you search for homosexuality at amazon.com at the moment.

More information is here and here

Here's a petition
and this way to the google bombing amazon rank
but I think the most effective way to get them to react to the uproar is to pull your orders and write them as a customer.

ETA: Looks like the fixing is in process, some of the books I had searched for earlier today too have gotten their ranks back (Like "The Filly", by Mark Probst who was one of the first people who brought this up).
Hopefully a proper explanation and/or apology is coming too.

ETA: tehdely 's troll theory sounds not totally unplausible (especially since the regular porn was left untouched). Looks like several claimed responibility for the maybe hack in response of the theory. The internet is a messy place sometimes.

Comments

[shapinglight]

I don't even understand what Amazon rankings are. However, I know I don't want to carry on buying from them if they're being discriminatory.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

Basically it's a ranking of all articles based on how many copies they sold. An internal bestseller list.
It also influences the order in which search results are displayed, so titles with no rank would only be shown on the bottom of results, making the books much harder to find and virtually invisible if you're only searching by genres or general terms.

Btw I just read that John Barrowman's autobiography made the list...

I wont buy anything there anymore either under this circumstances but I seriously hope that they fix this in a satisfactory manner because I can't really fathom how to go without here in comic wasteland.

[shapinglight]

It would certainly be a pain not to be able to use them. How about Play.com? Do they sell comics?

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

I think they do, but they also charge pretty high shipping costs to get the stuff over here.

But if this doesn't resolve it's one of the places where I will look.