UPDATE: Former Amazon.com gay and lesbian studies editor Ron Hogan now works at GalleyCat as senior editor. He raises doubts there about Amazon’s “glitch” excuse, pointing first to Seymour’s experience in February and then to the fact that Amazon originally called this a “policy” decision (see here) before contradicting itself and calling it a “glitch”.

And now, I’m going to bed..

It’s shocking.

It’s bizarre, because Amazon.com maintains the sales rank of Playboy and Sports Illustrated, but not The Well of Loneliness or Fingersmith. On the other hand, Amazon.co.uk does contain the sales rank for these titles (that’s all I’ve managed to check so far). It’s very odd. (And Amazon.com does know I’m browsing from Ireland, as an automated message appears on their homepage, advising that Irish shoppers go to the .co.uk site.)

For anyone who doesn’t get what any of this shite means, from what I can tell this evening, the sales rank appears under the “Product Details” section, after you’ve clicked to view a particular book title. (It’s not the little yellow stars rating, which appears both in search results and on the product’s page.)

The significance of the sales ranking is that titles may then appear in the bestseller lists. In other words, it’s affects demand to the publisher/author and supply to the consumer. Sort of like a boycott-lite, if it was carried out by a retailer, betwixt the wholesaler and customer. Say, if Quinnsworth hid all the prosecco down the back of the shop behind the rice cakes (not that they’d ever do such a thing), but this is with books.