Book news

MANIFESTO

As a person who buys books for a living, I'm finding this ongoing story quite interesting. Early last weekend

Amazon ... mysteriously stripped the sales rankings of hundreds (thousands?) of books, many of them with LGBT subjects, and reclassified them as "adult" content. The move prevents those books from showing up on the site's Best Seller list and can seriously screw up search results, pretty much rendering some titles invisible ...

By early Sunday evening, in a post on Publisher's Weekly, Amazon blamed the whole debacle on a glitch and told the Associated Press it was being fixed. It's certainly possible. The changes were so outrageous, so sloppily applied -- by a company with a pretty decent track record, by the way -- that it's hard to believe anyone who wasn't smoking the world's biggest bong would have OK'd it, far less OK'd it without letting anyone know [sic].

The story doesn't appear to be over, and, as one who has a real audience for books like this one, I'll be interested to see how it shakes out.