amazon, just no.
For those of you who don't know, Amazon has done something awful if certainly not unprecidented in the world of consumer-sales and wtf-ery.
They've stripped the sales-ranking and ability to appear in best-seller lists from all items they've deemed "adult". This is ostensibly to protect their customer base from stumbling accross something they perhaps don't want to be confronted with lest they typo something into the search field and get a face full of erotica.
Fine, whatever. Standard practice to put the naked pictures and sex books on the top shelves, away from the eyes of young kids or those whose sensibilities decline to have sex etc thrust in front of their eyes. There's an argument to be made for inflicting unfair presentation on their marketplace on such works (since the net isn't a newsagent's shelf), but that's for another day.
Because according to Amazon, Heather Has Two Mommies is just as "adult" as the Karma Sutra, pop-up edition... along with any work on their site which focuses on LGBT themes or essentially isn't "straight".
The kicker is, that the Playboy: Classic Centerfold Edition retains its ranking and appears on multiple best-seller lists. The original blow to the writers, readers and publishers of LGBT-concerned works has now been capped by the atrocious double-standard that sees a book of naked women posing in sexually provocative position for the gratification of a male audince considered more publically palletable and suitable for all eyes than a 36 page children's book about a kid in an elementary school class drawing a picture of her parents.
I've already written them an email and submitted it through the 'contact us' part of the website. It took me ten minutes just to get the pages to load, that's how much traffic it has right now... on the UK site, at half past midnight.
Methinks plenty of people are contacting them, demanding this be recified before they lose their business, just as I did. I'd urge you to be one of them. This is either real stupidity or a calculed marginalization of the "non-straight" way of life. You wouldn't take it if every book dealing with being black, Iraqi or over the age of thirty was treated this way, and that is exactly how arbitary this action has worked out to be.
ps: apologies for typos. it is late and i am PISSED OFF.
They've stripped the sales-ranking and ability to appear in best-seller lists from all items they've deemed "adult". This is ostensibly to protect their customer base from stumbling accross something they perhaps don't want to be confronted with lest they typo something into the search field and get a face full of erotica.
Fine, whatever. Standard practice to put the naked pictures and sex books on the top shelves, away from the eyes of young kids or those whose sensibilities decline to have sex etc thrust in front of their eyes. There's an argument to be made for inflicting unfair presentation on their marketplace on such works (since the net isn't a newsagent's shelf), but that's for another day.
Because according to Amazon, Heather Has Two Mommies is just as "adult" as the Karma Sutra, pop-up edition... along with any work on their site which focuses on LGBT themes or essentially isn't "straight".
The kicker is, that the Playboy: Classic Centerfold Edition retains its ranking and appears on multiple best-seller lists. The original blow to the writers, readers and publishers of LGBT-concerned works has now been capped by the atrocious double-standard that sees a book of naked women posing in sexually provocative position for the gratification of a male audince considered more publically palletable and suitable for all eyes than a 36 page children's book about a kid in an elementary school class drawing a picture of her parents.
I've already written them an email and submitted it through the 'contact us' part of the website. It took me ten minutes just to get the pages to load, that's how much traffic it has right now... on the UK site, at half past midnight.
Methinks plenty of people are contacting them, demanding this be recified before they lose their business, just as I did. I'd urge you to be one of them. This is either real stupidity or a calculed marginalization of the "non-straight" way of life. You wouldn't take it if every book dealing with being black, Iraqi or over the age of thirty was treated this way, and that is exactly how arbitary this action has worked out to be.
ps: apologies for typos. it is late and i am PISSED OFF.