Hello, complaint department?

I am preparing one of those “coming down the pike” entries to let you faithful friends know what new and exciting baseball titles await you in the year ahead. Amazon is my on-line book merchant of choice because, big.

But I have a couple of complaints:

1. I think I’m pretty savvy when it comes to setting up search parameters. But I have yet to find a way to eliminate the dozens of titles specifically meant for young readers, especially young young readers (under 10). The latest results tell me there are 230 books under the keyword “baseball,” but in order to get to the “good stuff,” I have to wade through page after page of juvenile literature because there’s no way to filter  them out. Grrrr.
2. Last year I found a surprisingly large number of books that could be generously classified as “romantic literature,” or what some people might call porn (“I know it when I see it,” as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said). I’m not one for baseball fiction in general, let alone this hazarai.

I wrote about this frustrating time-waster some time ago and was informed by a commenter that it was Amazon’s way of keeping you on the site longer, that maybe I’d find something I wanted to order for a child as a gift, etc.

That has never happened.

So, pretty please, Amazon, do something about this. You already have a function by which you can aim at specific age groups for younger readers. Are you afraid if you have a category for “18 and older” people will think it’s x-rated?