Tuesday, April 14, 2009

I haven't laughed this hard in a while...

Wow... So you may be aware of the latest Amazon news where all of the listed books with any gay or lesbian themes or content were moved off of the regular category and off into the "adult" book section. Which means that any book that so much as talks about people who are gay, or has gay characters is no longer searchable and will not appear unless it is specifically named by a customer who is signed in and is verified to be over 18 years old. It apparently also removed all of the "rankings" for these books.

The jury is still out on why this happened. Amazon says that there might have been some odd glitch, while a "famous" hacker, Weev, is claiming he pulled off the prank.

Whatever. Its annoying but is being rectified apparently, so isn't worth getting too many panties bunched up about...

But! For a while, despite removing most of the gay literature, there were plenty of anti-gay books that remained in the normal category. As a result, this book popped up as the first hit when searching "homosexuality" on Amazon:




Check it out for yourself.



But when you are done looking on in aghast horror, take a peek at the "User Submitted Pictures" associated with the book.

O... M... G...

(pst... Its in the upper left hand corner, just under the book picture.)

3 comments:

brett said...

I kind of just let this one roll on by and haven't given it much thought. I read somewhere that it affected more than just LGBT books, though LGBT bloggers weren't quick to point that out. I think I'm going to have to chalk this up to some odd glitch unless some other piece of evidence is revealed. I just don't think a pimply faced kid could've pulled this off.

I did however check out your featured book on Amazon and the user submitted photos! Glad the book is getting the publicity it deserves! But I am almost curious to find out what exactly such a book would talk about. Perhaps drinking a pint a day during the second trimester?

Ricky Blaha said...

They took the pictures down by the time I saw this...but WOW...If they are going to move books dealing with sexuality to the Adult section, they should move ALL of them, so a search for homosexuality comes up empty unless you are an adult. Not move all of them except for the anti-homosexual books behind. If they don't fix this "glitch" in a few days, my panties will have been bunched too much so I will definitely be boycotting Amazon!

Ricky Blaha said...

At the bottom of the Amazon search page is a:

Search Feedback
Did you find what you were looking for? Yes No

...so I hit No and gave them my two cents!