The internet retailer Amazon has found itself at the centre of a censorship row after it decided to remove a number of so-called adult books from its online charts.
Over the weekend, thousands of books have lost their sales rank – the number that Amazon uses to show how well one title sells compared with another – as the company apparently seeks to make its bestseller lists more family friendly.
But thousands of users have voiced concern after the seemingly random application of the new rules not only affected a number of high-profile authors, including Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, but also led to thousands of gay and lesbian titles being stripped of their sales rank, regardless of their sexual content.
After being bombarded with angry emails from authors and readers, Amazon blamed a "glitch" in its system, which it said last night was being fixed.
But just a few days ago, the company told complainants books classed as containing "adult material" had been prevented from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists "in consideration of our entire customer base". Yesterday a spokeswoman denied there was ever any such "policy".
Rankings matter to authors because they affect how their books come up in a search. The higher the ranking, the more likely the book is to come up when a customer is looking for it.
As of this morning, books without rankings included Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar and Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Maurice, Forster's coming-of-age tale about a young man's first gay love, had also disappeared, along with the 2004 Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst.
The ranking removal seemed to depend on how Amazon filed each book. The 2003 paperback edition of Fry's autobiography Moab Is My Washpot, which Amazon tags as "gay", is unranked, whereas the original hardback , filed under "memoir", has a ranking.
Amazon's customers are able to tag books themselves, and a number of contributors have flagged up hundreds of books affected by the "glitch" using the tag amazonfail.
The affected books all seem to have hetero- and/or homosexual content. The New Joy of Sex, an updated version of the 70s classic, which is filed under the subject "sex/sexuality", has lost its ranking, while the original edition (subject "love/sex/marriage"), from 1974, is ranked. DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, meanwhile, is now unranked.
The removals prompted furious remarks on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere online.
One Twitter user noted: "THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK is ranked; THE JOY OF SEX is unranked. In other words, Amazon would rather you make napalm than get laid."
Zoe Margolis, the blogger and author of Girl With A One-Track Mind, complained on her Twitter feed that the US edition of her book, which Amazon had filed under "sexuality" or "erotica", had lost its ranking, while the UK version, filed under "memoir", was ranked.
"It's as if Amazon said 'An idea! Let's get rid of all the queers and perverts!!!' and then reset all their search algorithms," she wrote.
She told the Guardian that if the policy was really to safeguard users from "adult" content, it was inconsistent, as many titles had slipped through the net.
"Horribly ironically, the stuff that does seem to be widely available are books like the Playboy Centrefold collection, which Amazon classes as 'photography'," she said.
Jeanette Winterson told the Guardian: "I hate categories anyway, I think they are unhelpful, but if Amazon are making a value judgment here, then that's much more serious and obviously that needs to be addressed."
Craig Seymour, author of the gay memoir All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C, wrote on his blog yesterday that his sales rank was dropped in February, then restored nearly four weeks later, after he was told by Amazon that his book had been "classified as an adult product".
When one author, Mark R Probst, wrote to Amazon last week to ask whether the firm has "some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books", he received a similar reply.
"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature," explained "Ashlyn D" from Amazon's member services department.
When contacted by the Guardian, an Amazon spokeswoman said that there was "a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed". However, the company refused to elaborate on why that move was made, or how the filter to choose which books were excluded was applied.
An online petition, which already has almost 10,000 signatures, is lobbying Amazon to answer questions about the seeming double standard, and other complainants have sent objections to the Seattle-based company.
Although the move does not mean the affected books are no longer on sale, it does block them from being able to access some of the site's most powerful areas – potentially affecting sales as a result. Without sales ranks, books cannot appear on many of the site's popular charts or suggestion pages, for example.
The move has left authors, publishers and readers angry, but also highlights the extent to which Amazon has become one of the most powerful forces in the publishing industry – with the power to make or break a book.
