April 14, 2009 by Jenny Sanderson
Amazon.com has courted controversy over the last few days by banning adult books and DVDs from its list of bestsellers. The upshot being that the books and DVDs no longer featured on the all important sales rankings. The online retail giant became the subject of a deluge of emails bouncing around the internet over the long weekend, asking people to boycott the site in response.
If you’re sitting there asking what all the fuss is about, then you’d probably have a point, of course you don’t want adult content on a page as visible as a bestseller list, where it could easily be stumbled upon by a child. However, the issue comes when you consider Amazon’s slightly bizarre definition of ‘adult.’ The new rule seemed to affect mainly books and DVDs with gay or lesbian themes, like Brokeback Mountain, and even ones without any particularly sexual content.
This was taken as discriminatory and the backlash began. Amazon however, have denied that there is a discriminatory policy in place, or in fact any particular policy of removing anything, describing the removal of the work as an ‘issue’ or ‘problem’.
‘It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally.’- Amazon Statement.
So what’s going on? Well, as always, when we know, you’ll know.
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