Slashdot Mirror
Amazon is Burying Sexy Books, Sending Erotic Novel Authors to the 'No-Rank Dungeon' (vice.com)
Samantha Cole, reporting for Motherboard: In the last few days, word has spread among independent erotica authors on social media that Amazon was quietly changing its policies for erotic novels. Five authors I spoke to, and several more on social media, have reported that their books were stripped of their best seller rankings -- essentially hiding them from casual browsing on the site, and separating them from more mainstream, safe-for-work titles.
[...] Most people browsing Amazon books might not notice or care about the best seller rank -- a number that's based on how well the title is selling on Amazon.com -- but it's part of an algorithm that influences how the book appears in search, and whether it shows up in advertisements, including suggestions from one product to the next ("If you like this book, you might like this book"). For independent authors and booksellers, this ranking is hugely important for visibility.
[...] Most people browsing Amazon books might not notice or care about the best seller rank -- a number that's based on how well the title is selling on Amazon.com -- but it's part of an algorithm that influences how the book appears in search, and whether it shows up in advertisements, including suggestions from one product to the next ("If you like this book, you might like this book"). For independent authors and booksellers, this ranking is hugely important for visibility.
If I search for books on dinosaurs, I don't really want to see a "romance" title about a guy and a t-rex having sex.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
People seem to forget that Amazon is a private business. They can do whatever they want. If they choose to not show your book, that is up to them. They are not blocking the sale of the book. The author can sell the book on their own site, or at another book store if they like.
If the book was removed from the INTERNET, this may be a problem because it is the removal of freedom of speech. Not shown in Amazon searches.... nothing to see here... move along.
Or they're filtering out low effort sleaze so that their browsing/recommendation system is usable.
The same problem has hit my local library. Browsing their ebook collection is an exercise in clicking through six million low-effort pieces of trash.
Amazon sacrificing erotic authors in attempt to placate the Orange one in response to his tweet.
My brain just automatically translates that to read "Amazon women sacrificing erotic authors... "
I'm with Playboy. There's something wrong with sexual prudishness holding sway in all these giant Internet companies.
Religious folk would be happy, while '60s hippies aghast after their efforts at the sexual revolution.
Two days ago on the CNN home page, the Playboy story was literally right next to the story on Walmart removing Cosmo from checkout line stands, where it has been in supermarkets since I was born.
Looks like the equivalency of religion and politics, and politics taking over as religion, is deeper, and sadder, than anyone realizes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Nobody is disputing that point; you've concocted a fake argument so that you can easily dismantle it and look like you've made a point.
They best not try to bury the great Chuck Tingle, author of such books as, Space Raptor Butt Invasion, which is book one of the Space Raptor Butt Trilogy. His earlier work, such as Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt are already classics. However, his newer work, such as the speculative Slammed In The Butthole By My Concept Of Linear Time is not quite as good as his earlier work.
https://www.amazon.com/Space-R...
https://www.amazon.com/Slammed...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hillary lost the election.
My brain just automatically translates that to read "Amazon women sacrificing erotic authors... "
Sounds delicious. Is this book illustrated, or...?
Umm, asking for a friend.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's not unsual for an author to categorize an erotica book as a romance book to get more visibility. Not surprising that explicit books are being recharacterized as erotica.
I read
... then ...
" Amazon is Burying Sexy Books, Sending Erotic Novel Authors to the 'No-Rank Dungeon' "
" President Trump Slams Amazon For 'Causing Tremendous Loss To the United States' "
Amazon needs a Safe Mode.
Maybe Amazon should consider a separate listing for Erotics? With the Internet, I'm sure there's customer demand for this kinda of stuff so why not setup a separate restricted group.
Worldly advice has always been sex sells ... well, may be not.
Time to get out of the dirt and darkness and embrace Jesus.
The issue is that porn is one of those businesses where the producers will seek out and try new methods of distribution long before the mainstream does. Essentially Bezos used erotic novel authors to help jumpstart amazon.com (Amazon began as an online bookstore). Now that it's branched out and grown big enough that Bezoes doesn't feel he needs them anymore, he's burying them. It is literally climbing on the backs of other people to haul yourself up into a dominant position, then discarding them. Decent people don't do that. They acknowledge those who helped them rise up to success, and even give them a helping hand in the future (I scratch your back, you scratch mine). I'd been hoping Bezos was better than this, but it's sounding like he's just another Gates, Jobs, or Ellison (take as much as you can, and discard the person once they lose their usefulness).
This is all so simple to fix without taking the drastic step Amazon seems to have taken (based on the summary - TFA won't load in my browser due to some script it's trying to run). You flag all products which could be considered adult. Then you add a "hide adult content" setting in the account settings and set it to On by default, and let the user decide whether to leave it on or turn it off. The physical analogy is a room in the back of the video rental store where you put all the adult videos, and customers can decide for themselves whether or not to go into that room.
a lot of sites are removing or downgrading 'sexy' and 'offensive' content in the wake of the feds recent gutting of safe harbor provisions.
In the west fewer people may be religious nowadays but the mechanisms that undelie religions still operate on people and so we get this new wave of morality
It's no wonder Trump is angry at Amazon now!
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
True to the spirit of slashdot, I did not read the entire piece. But this stands out:
âoeThere's no way for an indie author to make a living without Amazon, so whatever nonsense they decide they're pulling this month is just one other thing we've got to put up with,â Trout said."
How was an indie author making it before Amazon? And where does it say Amazon has to ensure the business vitality of all writers? As others have said, they are a private business, and can conduct their business accordingly. If some indie writer of romance and erotica can no longer make a living writing this stuff, because Amazon's proprietary algorithms no longer rank these things, then boo-hoo. Amazon isn't there to entitle you to making a living the way you want to. This just seems to be much ado about nothing.
They are growing massive and most people using their services don't know anything about their massive and widespread censorship practices. People are choosing them based on convenience and technical capabilities with no idea they are engaging in these practices.
Just some months ago Amazon started selling sex toys.
damaged by dogma
Ezekiel 23:20
Have gnu, will travel.
What was happening previously was that racy books were showing up for searches for normal books, often absurdly unrelated searches. They were gaming the searches like it was the early days of Google.
I don't know if Amazon was weighting the sales numbers too highly in their algorithm or what, but even quite specific searches for normal topics might have the bizarre racy results showing higher than strongly selling normal books.
So I say, good: it's about time.
If this is a problem somehow, then fine, give us an easy, prominent account setting to say "no smut". Then go back to your old algorithms to your heart's content.
But something was not right before, in any case.
"POUNDED IN THE BUTT (tm) by Sexy Books buried in the Amazon No-Rank DUNGEON"!
That one's free Chuck, it's immediately obvious to any skilled practitioner in the field...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No rank? No wank.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A handful of the "noticed" times that Amazon has discriminated against "sex."
2009 - Amazon Culls Offensive Books from Search System
2010 - Amazon Taking Down Erotica Removing from Kindles
2013 - Books with Questionable Content Being Deleted from eBookstores in Sweeping Ban
2015 - How Amazons Monster Erotica Book Ban Shaped Cloudflares Censorship Stance
An ongoing attempt to remove anything "too sexy" from general search, or outright bans of fringe content.
Anyone remember this, back in 2011?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
They decided to stop selling Yaoi manga. For anyone not aware of the term, it's male homo-erotic manga. However, they didn't stop selling Yuri - the female equivalent with homosexual relationships between women instead of men.
It struck me at the time as blatant homophobia on the part of Amazon, I never bought any yaoi or yuri from them in the first place, but after that (and various other shady practices, like their remote deletion of copies of 1984 that people had bought on Kindle) I stopped using Amazon at all.
Now you can of course argue that it's their business, and they are free to sell or not sell whatever they choose - and that's absolutely fine by me, in fact I'd disagree if you tried to force their hand in terms of what they can sell or not. By the same token though, I'm free to buy from them, or not. I don't.
I'm not a prude but I'm never going to buy one, Why can't I just set my Amazon user profile so they never offer them to me? Of course, romance books are almost as bad. A romance with a spaceship in it is not science fiction, it's just a subcategory of romance. A romance where the heroine using Celtic magic to transport herself back and forth to her lover in ancient Scotland is not fantasy, it is just a subcategory of romance. Romances with private investigators in them (notice how I didn't use the slang term for a detective to get a cheap laugh?) are still romances. Tired of all the romances clogging up my searches (and the top 100 lists) for books I want to read. Maybe Amazon just needs a way to let us filter out covers with hairless male torsos on them?
There was a piece on Australian TV about Walmart removing Cosmopolitan magazine from the shelves. It seems the group that pestered them into it were masquerading as part of the #MeToo movement but they had recently undergone a name change, and were actually another right wing religious organization riding on #MeToo's coat tails.
I wonder if there's something like that going on here? Maybe some nasty little group of religious bigots is harassing Amazon behind the scenes.
well Nixon was the first to embrace the Southern religionist bigots in 1968 with his "southern strategy"
No, they've been doing this for a while now. Seriously, they've been doing it to me and my book, The Book of Lilith, for a long time. Go to Amazon, search for it by name. Chances are it won't show up at all -- because they at some point decided it was "erotica". Which it absolutely is not. It has sex in it. It is a mature themed book -- the whole Lilith legend is about sex and gender relationships. But it is not porn, or erotica. I had it classified as SF&F, which is much closer to what it is, mythopoeic fantasy.
As a consequence, you have to a) Search by a string as explicit as "The Book of Lilith by Robert Brown", and when you do THAT you still don't see it, you only get "Your search contains adult items which have been hidden. If you wish to see them, Show all results". Finally, if you click that, Amazon reveals to you that I've written a book! Oh! You can buy it!
In the meantime, it NEVER shows up on a search of Lilith related material. Half of these books are filled with erotic vampire scenes. Some are outright porn. But MY book has been classified without my knowledge or consent as erotica, and has vanished from everybody except people BROWSING for porn, who sadly aren't as likely to buy a book that is not, in fact, porn.
So all that is happening now is that the fact that they've been doing this for years now is finally coming to light. Maybe because of Trump, more likely because people are finally getting pissed enough to BRING this blatent, irresponsible, and unguided censorship to light.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
. . . 50 Shades of Obscurity
!!
hawk