By now, many of you have probably already heard the story the Twitterverse has dubbed #amazonfail – the revelation that Amazon.com has stripped sales rankings and searchability from titles it deems “adult.” Consider it the safesearch of the online shopping world. This might be a mere annoyance–most of us prefer to determine for ourselves the parameters of our searches–but many authors and bloggers contend that the stripped titles are overwhelmingly those that cover sexuality, feminism, and LGBTQ themes, with or without content that could be considered “explicit.”
[You can read more about the stripped titles, and why we should even care about rankings and searchability, all over the internets–but you might want to start with Mark R. Probst, Meta Writer, and Jezebel. Oh, and you can watch #amazonfail unfold by following that hashtag in action–if you hop on over to Twitter Search, you’ll see that #amazonfail and #amazon are among the top trends at the moment.]