Still, answers coming out of Amazon itself are conflicted and I have no idea what to think about what's really going on over there. There does seem to be an effort underway to remedy this situation (see update here), which is the important thing. But it's been an amazing phenomenon, regardless.
Debauchette has posted some more interesting thoughts here. In particular, she says this:
Sure, we have erotic texts that are intended to arouse the reader, and that genre of literature usually gets its own isolated aisle. But sexuality is often used as a means to explore deeper themes, or to expand on philosophical discourse, or to access internal experiences, psychology, emotion, spirituality. Sometimes sexuality is political, legal, historical, or grounded in current events, and can take the form of fiction, memoir, history, essay, poetry. Identifying something sexual as “adult” is clumsy and arbitrary, like some clunky algorhythmic Miller’s test.
Specifically, she's discussing the disappearance of Catherine Breillat's book, Pornocracy, that was the companion piece to her film Anatomy of Hell. I've found both book and film to be weird and full of philosophical problems (e.g., they posit a victimhood inherent to the female experience and a model of gay manhood as "pure" and immune to the "corruption" that is female. Such things make me bristle for several reasons.) But Pornocracy is an excellent example to point out that sexuality can function in a text as a vehicle to discuss any number of other things, just as debauchette says. And that's why Amazon's new practice of shuffling texts that deal in sexual subject matter to a virtual ghetto is so deeply unnerving. If we can no longer find books that talk about sex, we'll be losing a deplorably great percentage of centuries worth of recorded human thought -- thought regarding a hell of a lot of stuff that's only tangentially sexual in nature.
Anyway, all these other bloggers linked above and below have said it all better than I. With any luck, all 57, 310 books will have their popularity rankings properly restored in short order and Amazon will devise a smarter system for preventing Harry Potter searchers from stumbling upon this damnably pernicious book with it's filthy, wanton jacket.
N.B. To be fair, I ordered my personal copy of Pornocracy off Amazon a while ago-- and I had to wait several months for it. The current printing was released in July of last year. Before that, there was some older translation of it that Amazon just didn't stock. So, the barring of this particular book may have had just a little something to do with the fact that they've only sold a handful of copies (to pervs like me) in the first damn place.
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