Details at NonstopBooks—complete with some explicit titles, so don’t go there if you’re squeamish.
The books involved seem to be mainly of the dead-tree variety. But let’s extrapolate. Yet another case for e-book standards? We need all kinds of bookstores, not one big giant imposing its tastes on everyone. Proprietary forms and DRM are censors’ friends. The tighter the link between tech and content, the worse the choke-hold.
While Amazon isn’t censoring the books outright, it is applying morality. In fairness to Amazon, the New York Times keeps certain categories off its lists, and I can appreciate Amazon’s interest in being family-friendly.
The issue isn’t the right of Amazon or the Times to do this—rather it’s the need for diversity. And maybe disclosure, too? Amazon needs to level with its customers. Perhaps one possibility would be the option of toggling innonfiltered list.
(Via Bibliofuture at LISNews.)
“the New York Times keeps certain categories off its lists, and I can appreciate Amazon’s interest in being family-friendly. ”
I don’t know, I’d like to just see the real top 100 rather than have it filtered.
Same thing with the NYT. My understanding, for example, is that sales from Christian bookstores are excluded from the NYT bestseller list.
This is a weak post. Are these books available at other book sites? How are they handled there? This is too broad an issue to just cite Amazon. And what about ebooks? There are a number of vendors here: Step up and tell us if you’d sell/distribute those titles in e.
Fictionwise lists its books by numbers (i.e., bestsellers and new books) and not according to publishers which means that books by epublishers that are known for the erotic content can be placed highly in the list (and be more visible to readers).
This isn’t to say that the post isn’t full of conjecture on Amazon’s part, but there are other etailers who aren’t hiding erotic books.
Um, Mike, remember that Amazon want to be THE book supplier to the world, including those who buy book after book in proprietary e-formats.
That means that when Amazon plays down a title, the ramifications are greater than if Joe Doe’s Bookstore did. This is, in an Amazon context, a form of censorship.
Amazon is entitled to censor, weed, whatever you call it, but remember: this is one more blow against consumer choice. The best solution would be to let consumers choose what they wanted displayed on the lists. The default display could be a compromise. Seems to work for Google searching. So why not Amazon?
Meanwhile thanks to Jane for answering your question.
Usual warning: Blog posts by nature raise questions but generally are not the same as articles researched at length. Pay me and I’ll spend a few days on this. The true value of a blog comes from a mix of the posts and the comments, and both you and Jane added to it.
Thanks,
David
Categories for bestsellers of all sorts would make more sense. There are kinds of books I never read, bestseller or not. On the other hand, I would pay attention to a list of bestselling history books. Why mix them up into one jumble and then exclude just a few categories?
Mike Perry says:
“Categories for bestsellers of all sorts would make more sense.”
Amazon does exactly that. They do have an overall top 100 but they have Top 100 lists for a couple dozen other categories – one of which is history.
If you select the “Health, Mind & Body” category they have a sub-category there for “Sex” and a category for “Sex Instruction”.
While they may not incorporate these “risque” titles in their overall Top 100 the books listed in the “Sex Instruction” category when clicked to the actual book page do show the overall sale rank (as of the moment of this post “Tickle his Pickle is ranked 2013 in books (is that overall or just for this specific category?).
I can’t blame amazon for keeping these sorts of titles out of their easy to find Top 100 list. Given how worked up some Americans get over anything dealing with the topic it’s probably just not worth the hassles they would likely have to put up with.
I guess this is a case of damned if they do and damned if they don’t eh?
It does not appear to be just Amazon USA though. Amazon France has separate categories also in their “Meilleures ventes Livres”. There you’ll find a “Érotisme” section which has a lot more separate categories than the USA site.
Both sites do sell Hentai but only the French site seems to have a “Top 100” Hentai seller list.
I don’t see how this constitues any sort of censorhsip on amazon’s part. They are probably just trying to take a simple step to try and behave as many communities offline expect – in my community adult mags have to be (at least theoretically) kept from view and reach of minors.
This was covered by AlleyInsider in April.
My community, online and off, expects to be able to find what it looks for, if those things are in the shop or museum or library we’re looking in. It doesn’t expect to be shown Playboy magazine, but denied a nonsexual study of U.S. military policy about homosexuality. It doesn’t expect to be shown books that falsely claim you can stop your kids from being gay, and denied the ones that will help save a gay kid’s life.
If they want to remove erotica from the list, they should (a) say so and (b) have some sane definition of erotica. “Should gay people be allowed to serve in the army?” is not erotica.
If someone is actually searching for books by a particular author, they should be able to find them even if you’re worried that J. Random Parent would be upset about their children finding those books at random.
[…] 1: This is not a one-off mistake. According to a post at Teleread.org, books with sexy content have been targeted by Amazon before. Craig Seymour, author of “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, […]