Censorship at Amazon

Shall we call this AmazonFail 09?

It seems that Amazon.com and its subsidiaries Amazon.ca and Amazon.uk – and possibly other Amazon subsidiaries as well – have decided that books addressing gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and other queer issues – and a number of other books dealing with issues of sexual diversity - are very naughty books. You can still buy them, if you know how to search for them, but books that have been identified as dealing with these issues have been stripped of their sales rankings and therefore do not appear in bestseller lists or (I am told, I haven’t in the past used Amazon often enough to know the ins and outs) certain kinds of searches based on sales rankings.

One small press publisher who noticed that the titles he sells had lost their sales rankings asked Amazon what was up, and received this charming note in response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

People who have been checking out the extent of the stripping have reported that, while the exact list of “disappeared” books varies from country to country, the kinds of books being excluded are:

*Gay and lesbian romance which is not sexually explicit, or is no more sexually explicit that your typical straight romance

*Literary classics such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and E. M. Forster’s Maurice

*Books on gay and lesbian parenting

*Non-fiction books on everything from theological discussions of homosexuality in the church to gay histories to reports on the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy

*Biographies and autobiographies of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trangender people from John Barrowman to Christopher Isherwood to Harvey Milk to Oscar Wilde


Apparently, fiction and non-fiction books dealing with BDSM, polyamory, and other kinds of sexual difference, ranging from Jacqueline Carey’s very popular Kushiel fantasy series to non-fiction books on sexuality aimed at people with disabilities, have also lost their rankings.


A master list of books known to be affected on at least one of the Amazon websites can be found here.


Information on how to complain to Amazon.com and its various subsidiaries is being posted in various places. On-line petitions are in process and strategising for protest is happening. For more information on taking action, look through the posts being archived here.


As for me, I certainly won’t be shopping at any Amazon website until this policy has been changed, and I certainly urge anyone who reads this to consider doing the same – and to let the Amazon website that serves your country know exactly why you are refusing to buy anything more from them.

And if you can think of anything else you can do to bring pressure to bear, the more power to you, and to us all.

More thoughts on Amazonfail

Fortunately, I remembered to check my outstanding book orders - I had an open order with some unshipped items from Amazon.ca. I cancelled my order immediately, and made use of the nice little box they provided for comments to explain exactly why I had cancelled and why I would not be ordering from them again while this "adult books" policy is in effect.

Now, of course, I will go find somewhere else to order the cancelled items from, because it's important that the authors don't suffer from our protest actions - many of them are already going to hurt enough when their books don't appear in searches and on bestseller lists - because that's one of the very important ways that authors reach new readers, and that's why this issue is about so much more than just making it harder for us, the readers, to find the books we want to read.

Authors who are writing the kinds of books that we will no longer be able to find from casual searches are going to lose sales if this policy continues, and some of them may not be able to find publishers in the future if their sales numbers fall, and that will make all of us immeasurably poorer.

So - don't just protest this.

If you can, if you have the financial ability to do so, please consider going to your local independent bookseller, or to an online bookseller that's not out to censor books and impoverish authors who are writing "adult" material, and buy one of the books that has been stripped of its sales ranking on Amazon. There's lots of good books to choose from.