I know I sent a letter to my Yahoo Group, Zamaxfield’s Cyber Cafe about the Amazon practice of surreptitiously seeing to it that GLBT titles–not mine actually, but some very fine literary and scholarly titles–do not get on bestseller lists by removing their sales ranking. I found this mildly disturbing seeing that they allow books like “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” to have a rank. I would argue that the practice of manipulating data to maintain a bestseller list that is hand-picked to be free of any and all references to GLBT culture is more than insidious. I would argue that if Bret Easton Ellis’s book American Psycho can be on the bestseller list, so can Nathaniel Frank’s Unfriendly Fire. But I don’t have to. My homies at the L.A. Times have argued it for me. Here.
You can make up your own minds, but as for me, I’d rather I choose the books I read than allow some droid at Amazon to do it. And until they resolve the Issue, Barnes and Noble is my bookstore. Amazon Prime be damned.
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