After enjoying church and a nice Easter meal with my parents, I came back online to find that Amazon.com had removed sales rankings from many LGBT-themed books, making it impossible to find them with a normal Amazon search. An automated response to complaints stated that those books had been removed because of “adult content” – however, not only did many sexually explicit heterosexual books keep their ranking, but completely non-explicit books like lesbian parenting guides, LGBT- themed books for young adults or autobiographies by gay men and women didn’t.

Needless to say, my head exploded with RAGE. 🙂 By now Amazon has backpedalled, stating the whole thing was caused by a “glitch”. I find it quite reassuring that online outrage (for example, we google bombed the term Amazon Rank, making it #1 in Google search results) resulted in an immediate reaction.

The image links to an overview of the whole issue by an author who was affected by this all the way back in February. I also found this recent AfterElton blogpost summarising quite nicely what bothers me so much about the whole thing, glitch or no glitch. And now I’ll go back to enjoying my day off…