Digital searches makes censorship subtle (Score 1)

I'm surprised by assumption people are making here about censorship needing to be about an absolute lack of access. On Amazon, lots of people type in a topic, and don't get beyond a few pages before they buy something or tire of looking. Given that the rank of books on a topic are listed by sales rank, as far as I can tell, that means that stripping out the sales ranks of certain books makes them much harder to access. Which is part of why the argument above that they're 'catering to their market' doesn't quite work: if that were the case, then the 'offensive' books would be the 'unpopular' books; i.e., they'd come up last in any given search, and we wouldn't even be having this conversation. It's also not affecting a fair proportion of het porn and romance, whilst gay porn and gay romance (or even just literature *about* gay people e.g. "Oranges are not the only fruit") have been stripped of their ranks. But it's not just content designed to arouse that's being de-ranked: self-help books and even academic texts are being affected, even though studies of minorities such as GLBT and studies of sexuality more generally have been accepted areas of academic study for some time now. The main issue, I think, is that this is affecting how searches work. Try searching for "A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory" and you'll only be offered the hard cover versions, which are currently out of print. In order to find the current, in-print version, you have to search under the author's name. It doesn't need to be overt censorship when these kinds of subtle rearrangements of db searches are going on: it's only because I already knew all the details of the book I was searching for that I knew to keep looking til I found it. This is particularly problematic as many people rely on Amazon to have one of the most up-to-date dbs of books in the world, and info about which version is currently in print - and this includes people who work in bookstores...