old but still interesting...

Or is the story just developing new twists? You probably know what I'm posting about. I just thought I'd try to bring together a few of the discussions and activity going on about it.

Over the Easter weekend, various writing and author blogs I regularly visit were posting about Amazon.com's recent actions of removing the rankings of various titles in their database. This was the official statement: 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. However, this "adult" rating seemed to apply to hot (okay, very hot) romance, or GLBTQ books. It became very difficult to search and find these books easily at Amazon. But one wouldn't have the same difficulties with the books (for example) about bomb building, or pornography or dog fighting. Dear Author is on top of the latest developments (and is a great site to visit in general :)

There is a petition to sign in protest at Amazon's new "adult" policy. When I was there, the target was 10,000 signatures. Now it is aiming for 26,000.

Significant media coverage continues, and here's another article I came across today: "Amazon blames ham-fisted error for book brouhaha"

Let's end on the note of SBTB's suggestion to add this verb to our vocabulary: Amazon Rank.