For some odd reason, on April 10, 2009 Amazon started removing the sales rankings of hundreds of books. Most of the books are books Amazon considers to be gay and lesbian.These are not pornographic titles. Most of these are not even fiction. These are all books that Amazon subject metadata identifies as having gay and/or lesbian interest. Mark Probst, author and publisher, is the first person I saw writing about this. here. Probst, who is both an author and a publisher, received this answer from Amazon when he wrote asking why sales rankings were being removed:

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. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us. Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

I've made a screen shot of Amazon's page for C. J. Cherryh's science fiction novel Regenesis. Notice the sales rank circled in blue; right below that image is a screen shot of Amazon's page for Nicola Griffith's Always. Notice the circle where the sales rank should be? Yes, you can still buy those books. But by removing the sales rankings of these carefully selected books, Amazon is "rigging" the sales rankings so that these books, no matter how good they are, won't show in searches. Unless you know the author or the exact title, you're likely not going to see listing for these "forbidden" books. This is the other important part. Amazon is not removing books from sales rankings because of graphic sex. They are removing them because they have gay and lesbian associations. There's a list of books herethat a lot of people have been contributing to. It's a pretty astonishing list, in part because of what it says about Amazon's definition of what a "queer" book is. I want to talk about a few specifics. For instance: Robert Adrich wrote Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History. This is a standard academic, somewhat dry historical survey. It's arranged like a dictionary, with short biographic entries. It's not sexy, or shocking, or even a little bit erotic. It's a solid piece of scholarship, the sort of think you'll find in a decent library's reference section. Rita Mae Brown. Rubyfruit Jungle. Brown's book was a best seller. It's now part of the canon, and taught frequently in English novel classes all over the English speaking and reading world. It's a bildungsroman, a coming of age novel. E. M. Forster, best known for his SF short stories, his "Indian" novel A Passage to India, the novel that became a film, A Room with a View. also wrote Maurice. This is typical understated slightly depressing Forster; think Henry James crossed with Somerset Maugham. I've taught this book; at least half the time readers don't even realize Forster is obliquely referring to sex. Forster wrote thoughtful, thought-provoking books that do tend to explore and raise questions about gender and culture. There's bitter irony in the fact that his book, Howard's End, whose epigraph reads "Only Connect," is apparently going to be dis-connected by Amazon. A local Washington SF and detective/mystery writer, Nicola Griffith has written lots of books. All of them have had their Amazon search ranking removed. Her book Always is about a murder, and it contains a delicately interwoven love story. To be blunt, there's more sex in a Harlequin romance than in this book. This is just a really good book that happens to have lesbian characters, including the lead, Aud. Honestly, I wonder if it's the book, or the sexuality of the authors that Amazon is really basing their decision on. Griffith has been out a very long time. Her books have queer characters much like they have Norwegian characters. Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness is often pointed to as a foundation author in queer studies programs. Maybe. This particular book is one of my least favorite books of all time, nonetheless, it is firmly part of the novel canon. It's routinely taught in college lit classes. It's not even a little bit erotic; there's more sex in Hamlet, than here. In fact the closes thing to sex in the whole book is this line: "And that night they were not divided." As much as I personally think it's maybe not so terrible for this book to have disappeared from searches, it's not a good precedent. Perhaps the most clear indication of malice and deliberate intent is that kid's books, like Heather Has Two Mommies. by Leslea Newman, illustrated by Diana Souza, has its previously high Amazon search rank removed. This book has won lots and lots of awards; its title tells the whole story. Amazon will sell you this book right now—if you know the author or title in order to find it. Otherwise, if you're just looking for a book for your kid because your child or her best friend has two mommies, you're pretty much out of luck at Amazon. Try Powells. The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience by Tin, Louis-Georges. Another scholarly, academic study. This is a pretty standard reference work, and well-regarded. The reason that removing the sales rank, and removing these books from being tracked that way is a problem is that the Search feature on Amazon by default is tied to sales rank. By removing these books from the ranking, they've done the digital equivalent of shelving them "in the back." These books are all much harder to find. Some of the books they're choosing to exclude seem very odd choices. Mary Renault's The Young Charioteer, for instance. Yes, they do have gay characters, but that's a minor aspect of the book. I'm braced to discover that Michaelangelo's sonnets, and all of Plato and Socrates have been omitted from sales rank too. Some of these books will no longer show up in searches at all, with sales rank stripped. No ranking can mean no showing. I note, however, that you can still buy Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley's Lover. This is sexually explicit, and while I don't think it's pornography, or erotica, I do think it's pretty awful writing. It's ironic that this book, written by a closet homosexual homophobe who doesn't like women, and has apparently never even heard of a clitoris, has sales rankings, when Well of Loneliness is, given how very similar the two writer's literary styles are, pretty much makes it clear that the issue isn't graphic sex. The issue is, apparently one of making queer books hard to find. Fortunately, you can still easily find Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. or Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds. But for me, the proof that there's something odd, and malicious, and deeply disturbing going on is that you can easily find Joseph Nicolosi and Linda Ames Nicolosi's A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. In fact, right now, if you enter "homosexuality" in Amazons Search function for books, this is the very first book that shows up. It wasn't the first book a week ago. There's some odd stuff in the decision making. Books about female sexuality, queer sexuality, and sex for disabled people are being targeted too. But the first set of fantasy books in the Kushiel's Dart series by Jacqueline Cary still have their sales rank; the more recent books do not. This really makes Amazon look very very bad. If this bothers you, and I hope it does, I've added some links for you to check it for more information. I'm fine with them choosing what not to sell; I'm less happy about them deciding how I'm allowed to shop. There's a petition you can sign in protest here.