Reaping what they have sown.

[flewellyn]

As many of you already know, Amazon.com has decided to "show consideration" for their "entire customer base" by delisting the sales rankings of GLBT-friendly books. They have not seen fit to do the same with anti-GLBT books, however, and as a result, Searching for "homosexuality" links to a series of homophobic books by right-wing fundamentalists.

In light of this, I sent this letter to Amazon.com moments ago:

I wish my account closed, effective immediately, in protest of your policies against GLBT content. I object in the strongest possible terms to this discriminatory behavior, and refuse to do any further business with you until such time as you cease such promotion of bigotry.

Sincerely,
[my name]

I would encourage all of you who read me, and have not already done so, to do the same.

Comments

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

I think Amazon got trolled, frankly.

I'm interested to see how they respond as the week progresses.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

I'm as offended by this as the next decent person, but I don't really see the point of closing my account immediately when, what with all the outrage, they might reverse all this fairly soon, at which point I'd have to start a new account and would have lost my order history, personal ratings, many preprogrammed addresses, and a couple hundred bucks in gift certificates.

[erica057.livejournal.com]

Yep, I emailed them pretty much the same thing.

What a dumb move. Who buys more books from Amazon, fundies or web-savvy liberal types??

[nimbrethil.livejournal.com]

I'm more and more convinced that this was a a mistake. An epic mistake, but a mistake all the same. I think that we all were a little too abrupt in rushing toward Amazon with torches and pitchforks.

[triplemare.livejournal.com]

Sent an email last night.
Had conciliatory "but we fixed it" whine-gram in mail this morning.
Double checked to see if they had.
Nope.
Fail.
I totaled up what I spent with them over the past year (alone) -- keeping in mind that I buy lots and lots and lots of books and gifts and and and...Then I sent them a note with that amount listed and saidk "no mo' for you, you lying lying people you"
Overall, my withholding those dollar contribs are not going to make or break them. But if I am just a sample...
Glee!

[foma44.livejournal.com]

ew.

amazon. is kinda the devil of the bookselling world for a few reasons now...

[lucretiasheart.livejournal.com]

Excellent idea.

[hypatiasghost.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for more information. I think it's suspicious that a company whose search engine brings up vaginal speculums when you search for girl scout cookies suddenly delisted GLBT books. Something strange is afoot, and Amazon may not be entirely to blame.

That's not to say I won't be closing my account in protest. But I will be waiting until we actually understand what happened.

[typsie.livejournal.com]

You might want to see this: http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html

[xuincherguixe.livejournal.com]

Well, a recent search seems to get hits on gay sex, general living, and hate against them. So I'm going to guess that either it was technical issues, or the backlash was so great that they're pretending it was technical issues.