Amazon has removed several yaoi manga from its Kindle Store and refused to allow others to be offered for Kindle, although the bookseller continues to sell the same manga in print and to offer more explicit erotic books in both formats. Yaoi manga, also known as boys-love or BL, is a popular niche genre in manga that features love stories between two males and can range from softly romantic to sexually explicit.

The manga publisher Digital Manga Publishing announced on its blog Tuesday that two of its books had been removed from the Kindle Store and two more were rejected, and the website The Yaoi Review also reported that several Yaoi Press manga and novels had been removed. At least one non-yaoi erotic graphic novel has also been removed from the Kindle Store this week. Amazon representatives contacted by PW did not answer e-mails or phone calls requesting more information.

**Update 5/9/11: Animate U.S.A., a Japanese publisher that publishers yaoi manga exclusively to the Kindle, stated in an e-mail that "some titles are already removed by Amazon without any specific reasons. We just know that the titles contain content that is in violation of their content guidelines." While the e-mail did not specify which titles have been removed, several titles that were announced in Animate's press releases are not available in the Kindle Store, including Delivery Cupid, vol. 1 of Mister Mistress, and Pet in Love (a Pet on Duty side story). Vol. 2 of Mister Mistress and the full Pet on Duty manga are still available. We are awaiting confirmation that these titles were removed by Amazon and not by Animate.

The three DMP manga that were removed or barred from the Kindle Store are available digitally on DMP's eManga website and on Barnes & Noble's Nook. Indeed, Lui said that DMP makes almost as much revenue from Nook sales as from Kindle, even though the Nook pays publishers a smaller percentage of the sale price and is not available worldwide. DMP is about to launch a major digital manga initiative, the Digital Manga Guild, which will involve digital publication of over 500 volumes of manga, the first few hundred of which, Lui said, would be yaoi.

Fred Lui, v-p of production at DMP, said that Amazon had not given him any rationale for the rejections and removals.

"I asked them why, and they said take a look at their content policy and directed me to what I had read a couple times before," he said. Lui said that he is not aware of any recent changes in the policy, and that DMP has been putting books rated for ages16+ and 18+ on the Kindle for the past few years with no problem. Digital does not publish any stories involving characters under 18, he added.

The two older manga, Weekend Lovers and King of Debt, had been available on Kindle since 2009, but Lui had recently updated the digital files, which may have caused them to be flagged, he said. Those books are from their 801 imprint, which includes their most explicit books.

Amazon also refused to carry two new books submitted to the store, the novel The Selfish Demon King and the manga anthology The Color of Love. Both are from Digital's June imprint, which features less explicit, more romantic stories.

"I was led to believe that maybe they had a new guy there and he was just overzealous, or what, I can't say, but it kind of seemed that they were kind of looking closer at our titles and trying to see if it complies with their explicit content restrictions," Lui said.

Kindle's publicly posted guidelines simply ban "Pornography and hardcore material which depicts graphic sexual acts" and "offensive material," which is defined as "probably about what you would expect."

Nonetheless, "Erotica" is the second-largest sub-category in Kindle's fiction department, with 26,149 titles available. The Kindle Store also includes a wide selection of photographic erotica, with titles like No Holes Barred and 18 Today! Indeed, Amazon continues to carry yaoi manga from DMP and other publishers in its Kindle Store, so it is unclear why these particular titles were singled out.

"I did try to publish a couple of new books and one didn't pass," Lui said. "I was quite surprised, and I told them, 'You are selling the print edition of the book. How is this any different?' and they just took a stubborn stand to it and said they are going to hold on their decision, and they didn't give any real solid reasoning for it."

Lui said that he had noticed that a number of non-yaoi adult manga from other publishers that had been added in recent months has disappeared in the past few weeks. One graphic novel, Christmas Creampie, which was pointed out as an example of explicit content remaining in the Kindle Store yesterday, is no longer there today.

News of the removals caused a storm of protest on Twitter, with some users reviving the #amazonfail hashtag that was used two years ago when Amazon removed a number of LGBT-themed books from its sales rankings. Those mass deletions turned out to be due to a glitch in the classification algorithm, while the current removals appear to be deliberate and selective. The Yaoi Review is encouraging readers to take their complaints directly to Amazon.