Jumping on the Amazon Fail Bandwagon

Monday, April 13, 2009

So I'm back in town and tired from driving most of the day, so I'm just posting a quick one tonight. I have a longer post planned - wrote most of it in my head while driving - but I'm too wiped to type it all out tonight. Tomorrow, I promise!

In the meantime, I want to talk a little bit about what I like to read... I read regular books of course, but I get a lot of inspiration from erotic novels/erotica. Like everything else in my life, I shop online for my erotic fix :) So I was a little peeved when I started hearing about Amazon's recent changes to sales rankings and what is classified as 'adult' material.

If you haven't heard, Amazon has been stripping the sales rankings from gay and lesbian literature (romance novels, erotica, etc.), books about sexuality and feminist books, among others. This matters because without sales rankings, these books frequently don't show up in searches. For example, an Amazon search for 'homosexuality' now turns up "A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality" as the first result. A strange collection of books have been classified as 'adult' material and are no longer showing up in searches, including books just about sex in general. For a time (it may have changed now) a biography of Ellen DeGeneres was even classified as 'adult' material.

Amazon swears that this is all a huge mistake, but it is slightly troubling that it largely appeared to affect books about sex and sexuality. Amazon has caught a lot of flack from blogs and such, so they're frantically trying to fix it. I don't want to get all political on my sex blog, but as someone who writes about sex, I wanted to be supportive of all the writers out there that got screwed (ha!) by Amazon's changes. I often use Amazon to order erotic literature and damn it, I want it to come up when I search for it :)

Jezebel.com has a good recap and list of books that were affected and those that were not... It does seem to be really unevenly applied, so hopefully it is all a glitch and I don't have to start shopping elsewhere for my wank novels :)

Oh well, time to drag my sleepy ass to the gym and try to undo all the fatty food I ate with the family. Perhaps Todd will be there doing the same? I'm starting to think he's never coming back...