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Originally Posted by GlennD
This seems to be much ado about nothing. Gay and lesbian books are being taken off the sales rankings along with other adult material. So what? The only complain I can see is that the standards aren't evenly applied amongst adult books.
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Having read through some of the comments on the other blogs, what they're saying is that by pulling the ratings, the books will not come up in a search done from the Amazon Home page. What was also said on the other blogs was that the same search
will bring up results from the "Books" search page.
On the DearAuthor.com page, many of the people with concerns are actually the authors of some of these adult and/or gay love stories - and in researching the problem, they've been finding how it's spread. At least a couple of the posters said that they'd been watching their own rankings throughout the day since the first "tweets", and saw their rating eventually pulled - so there's no real way to know if Amazon is done yet. So suddenly, a search from the home page by the author's name comes up with no matches.
And there also seems to be some discrepancies between various versions - the hardback "And Tango Makes Three" comes up on the main page, but the paperback won't. Either will come up on the books page.
The other thing that has come to mind is that sometime last year, Fictionwise took the "adult" books off the main "new ebooks" page.
However, there's a clear link at the bottom of the page to the adult books. So Fictionwise found a way to compromise between those who didn't want to sift through the adult titles when searching out new ebooks, and those who do. I didn't hear any complaining at all when that happened either.
Amazon does have the right to do as they please (within the law, of course). And I would suspect this wasn't done capriciously - they must have gotten enough complaints to make them take this step. However, the people who are feelings that their lives, their livelihoods, or just their tastes (erotic romance) are being marginalized or hidden also have a right to be angry and choose not to patronize Amazon, too.
It seems to me, Amazon was way too heavy handed in its handling of this. How hard would it have been to include an additional link for those who want to include adult/gay books in their search?