04.12
It figures that directly after I add some links to amazon on here to some items, amazon goes and impliments a censorship campaign that is just stupid and makes people want to boycot them…
There is even a campaign to googlebomb their Amazon Rank (hey look, I’m participating).
The Cliff’s Notes of the problem is that Amazon decided to filter out books about adult material from best seller lists and the like. The main problem is that they have taken out every book that mentions sex, but not left a way to bring them back. For instance, Google will filter out adult materials from it’s search, but if you change your filter settings, you see everything. Amazon left out that last part. Another problem that people are seeing is with what they left in, mainly Nazi books. Basically saying that Brokeback Mountian is bad, but Mein Kampf is good.
Myself, I see no problem with filtering results as long as they do two things:
First, they’ll need to fix what gets filtered out. They’ll need a little bit of a more intelligent system. This will probably be the hardest to do since books don’t have a rating system like movies or games, and even then, you’ll have people screaming censorship discrimination when their story about a gay midget prostitute who also performs in a Tijuana donkey show gets listed as adult…
Second, they need to impliment a setting that lets you see unfiltered listings, or, even better, set the filters to what you want, but they’ll have to figure out how to correctly filter first…
If you are really curious, you could always go here and get the numbers of Amazon’s Board of Directors and call them to find out what exactly they were thinking when they implimented this policy.