Tuesday, April 14, 2009

what the f#ck year is this?!?

Look at the article i found...


Amazon.com has sparked outrage after removing books the online retailer deems "adult content" from its sales rankings to make the site more family friendly. The problem? Gay and lesbian books, including the children's tome Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman and a biography of Ellen DeGeneres, were de-listed.

Uh, I'd hardly slap Heather Has Two Mommies or anything written by or about Ellen DeGeneres as adult content, but clearly, Amazon.com simply labeled any book with gay or lesbian content as being adult in nature.

FYI: Titles such as Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson; The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience edited by Louis-George Tin; and Radclyffe Hills' The Well of Loneliness were also among the hundreds of gay and lesbian books that were de-listed.

Now Amazon.com didn't stop selling these de-listed books. As noted above, the online retailer removed them from its sales rankings, which is not only a slap in the face to the LGBT community but is actually quite damaging for book sales as shoppers are oftentimes influenced by sales rankings.

Amazon.com insists that it didn't intentionally remove gay and lesbian titles from its sales rankings. A spokesperson for the company blames a computer "glitch" and says it will be fixed.
I believe that Amazon.com didn't purposely set out to censor gay and lesbian books. Still, the incident is disturbing because apparently someone at Amazon.com somewhere along the line must have plugged the keywords "gay" and "lesbian" into the program that removed adult content from Amazon.com's sales rankings, and it went unchecked.

Meanwhile, heterosexually-themed books with explicit sexual content including Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds and the graphic novel Lost Girls by Alan Moore were not de-listed.
So readers, what do you make of this controversy? Do you believe Amazon.com's claim that it unintentionally rated gay and lesbian books as adult content, and even if you do, does that make this incident any less upsetting?

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