NEW YORK - Amazon.com blames a "system glitch" for the removal over the weekend of popularity rankings from GLBT-themed books on the e-tailer's website.
In addition to books by lesser-known authors, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar and Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit were affected. So were the children's book Heather Has Two Mommies, Ellen DeGeneres' autobiography and The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience.
On blogs, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, cybercitizens expressed outrage evidently born of conviction Amazon was making a social statement. Users nearly immediately mounted an online petition drive to protest Amazon's behavior. By Monday morning, the petition had garnered 13,372 digital signatures.
Craig Seymour, author of the memoir All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C., posted on his blog that the rankings disappearance is nothing new. Amazon removed the ranking from his book Feb. 2, he noted, and initially called the action a "mistake." Later, the e-tailer said his memoir had been re-classified as adult material (it is not) and therefore the item was not eligible for ranking. Four weeks later, All I Could Bare's ranking showed up again in the product listing.
Author Mark R. Probst - whose debut young-adult novel The Filly was de-ranked even though it is a non-explicit tale about how a young man in the Old West comes to grips with his homosexuality - indicated on his blog that apparently every GLBT-themed book at Amazon was swept up in an employee's misguided effort to protect the public from adult content.
Authors rely on Amazon's sales rankings to drive additional sales. Classification as "adult" according to Amazon's standards not only makes items ineligible for sales rankings, but also for inclusion in most search results and on best-sellers lists maintained by the website.
Authors and readers remain irate, not least because Amazon's adult-content policy seems to be haphazardly applied, at best. On Monday, porn icon Ron Jeremy's explicit memoir, Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds (a collection of images of nude women), and Rosemary Rogers' Sweet Savage Love, Kathleen Woodiwiss' The Wolf and the Dove and Bertrice Small's Skye O'Malley (all of which are explicit heterosexual romances) remained ranked and on public display.
