Precious and Fragile Things

Dear Author: Why Amazon’s Explanation Is None At All

Point 1: This is not a one-off mistake. According to a post at Teleread.org, books with sexy content have been targeted by Amazon before. Craig Seymour, author of “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.,” was deranked in February. When questioned about this, Amazon claimed that it was adult content being intentionally filtered out. On April 10, 2009, Mark Probst, noticed that Gay romance authors Erastes and Alex Beecroft’s books from Running Press were deranked. On April 11, 2009, hundreds of GLBT books, including Probst’s own book, The Filly, were deranked. Amazon gave Probst the same response that certain content was deemed adult and thus filtered out of searches and lists. On April 12, 2009, all hell broke loose when the Twitterverse picked up on the deranking of gay, lesbian, erotic and feminist books. But to be clear, this started as far back as 2008. It’s just now come to a head.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: Amazon's Response: Bad

The delay in response was just breathtaking. GLAAD had a statement out LONG before Amazon responded, and even then, there’s no assurance that it won’t happen again except that it will be “corrected.” There was no response to the original evidence of book suppression - which leads me and many others to believe that the suppression is standard operating procedure. I don’t think I can measure how much that discomforts me. As I tweeted last night: Soylent Amazon is made out of people.

What also stunned me with the epic PR fail was that Amazon did not respond to the community that raised the concerns in the first place: nothing on Twitter. Nothing on the Amazon.com website. Only a template email from their customer service department that was identical to the statement - a statement made initially to an online-only newspaper, and again, not the Amazon website.

Dear Author has posed the theory that Amazon was using "category metadata" to filter out books that were specifically listed as gay and lesbian.

At the suggestion of someone I looked up the category meta data provided by the publisher to Amazon. I looked up over 40 books that had been deranked and filtered out of search engines. It appears that all the content that was filtered out had either “gay”, ”lesbian”, ”transgender”, “erotic” or “sex” metadata categories. Playboy Centerfold books were categorized as “nude” and “erotic photography”, both categories that apparently weren’t included in the filter. According to one source, the category metadata is filled in part by the publisher and in part by Amazon.

Heather with Two Mommies included this category metadata:

Books > Subjects > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Fiction > General
Books > Subjects > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Fiction > General AAS
Books > Subjects > Gay & Lesbian > Parenting & Families
Books > Subjects > Gay & Lesbian > General AAS
Books > Subjects > Teens > Social Issues > Homosexuality > Fiction

A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality had this category metadata (note the lack of any reference to gay & lesbian categories):

Books > Specialty Stores > Custom Stores > Qualifying Textbooks > General AAS
Books > Subjects > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Sociology > Culture
Books > Subjects > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Sociology > Marriage & Family
Books > Subjects > Parenting & Families > Parenting > General
Books > Subjects > Parenting & Families > Parenting > General AAS
Books > Subjects > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > General
Books > Subjects > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > General AAS
Books > Subjects > Religion & Spirituality > General
Books > Subjects > Religion & Spirituality > General AAS
Books > Refinements > Binding (binding) > Paperback
Books > Refinements > Format (feature_browse-bin) > Printed Books

OK, so it was a programming glitch, but not in the way Amazon is trying to play it off as. They targeted what they deemed adult content, but in doing so they made the mistake of using the terms "gay and lesbian" to find the content.

You see, the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. You get it in your head to protect the innocent children/pearl clutchers from "adult" material, so you create this handy little code or program that does just that because there's no way a small number of people are going to go through and tag millions of products. Over a holiday weekend, you find out you screwed up, and then you learn further that what makes something "adult" is subjective, and then you tell people it was "policy" only to flip back and say "Glitch! Dear Freud, I meant to say glitch!" By that point you and Satan are in the boardroom discussing what went wrong over a cup of joe, and the only thing you can say is "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time."

Amazon fucked up, and they fucked up big. You may think LiveJournal was spanked by Fandom over Strikethrough, but we just witnessed Amazon feel the hard backhand of the entire internet, and they haven't even started yet. This clusterfuck of programming to customer service to PR is going to leave Amazon looking bad for a long time to come. As it is, it's going to take a long time to repair, so once the stars clear from Amazon's eyes, they need to get on the horn and start aplogizing to everyone. There needs to be full dislcosure. Tell me what went wrong, and be honest about it. Admit you targeted terms like "gay and lesbian," and admit you now know it was a mistake. Make me, well, not, make the authors who trusted you to sell their books believe that you will endeavor to never do something so stupid again without first thinking of the possible consequences.

I think Neil Gaiman has said it best:

...Amazon describing it to the AP as "a glitch" isn't as reassuring as they might perhaps have hoped. Something's obviously wrong, and it's something that Amazon should not ever have touched with a ten-foot bargepole. But who made it happen, and whether it was stupid or evil, and how long it's going to take to fix, and whether they're going to apologise, all remain to be seen. (NB. If you're an Amazon spokesentity and you're reading this, trust me, the whole apology thing would be a really smart idea.)

Like I said, you start targeting material for "adult," and you're going to wind up in hell with thousands of rabid Twitterers sending up hashmarks disparaging your company with every tweet.

Why Amazon Can't Just Call Gay Blacklist a 'Glitch' - The online bookseller now needs to explain why a temporary glitch "recently" discovered has been affecting gay-themed novels going back to at least early February, when (as we noted previously) former gay stripper Craig Seymour saw the sales ranking on his memoir disappear even as Diablo Cody's stripper memoir retained its sales rank. Seymour complained at the time and eventually resolved the issue, so it's not like Amazon didn't have warnings of the problem before this weekend.

#AmazonFail: A Personal Perspective - Seriously, look at the image from the writer's twitter. He's right.

tehdely poses an interesting conspiracy theory, but I'm not sure I really buy that.

A "glitch"? Really? I tried something I read about last night in shangy_feminism (that particular post is f-locked, or it was last night - I'll check again). I went to Amazon and entered the term "homosexuality" in the search field. The first thing I pulled up? A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. The third search item? You Don't Have to Be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling With Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is. Most of the books on the first page are Christian in origin, though not all of them appear to be about curing "teh gay." Wouldn't the "glitch" get those too as it seems to be targeting specific terms?

For lulz, I did a search for "sex" (both of these were general searches, not looking for books). The first link I get? The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex, Third Edition. It appears to be a heterosexual couple on the cover. Then, there's a link to vibrators and other things, then there's some movies listed (at a glance, it appears to be comedies, or dramas targeting heterosexual audiences). I narrowed the search down to books and I get plenty of how-to manuals, and most seem to be heterocentric in nature, though a few could go either way based on the title alone. However, the question remains: Why can I find these things in general searches, but the GLBT books that were targeted are considered adult per Amazon's apparently long-standing policy regarding adult material?

Sorry, I'm not ready to dismiss this as a glitch or human error. It comes across as far too specific, and all the "right" books were hit, while others have been allowed to keep their sales ranking (i.e. Ron Jeremy's autobiography).

ETA: Jezebel is als on top of things, with a list of books affected and not. (Heather Has Two Mommies was stripped of its salesranking, but I can get the misgogynistic pile of crap that is Belligerence and Debauchery: The Tucker Max Stories? When did I enter Bizarro world?)

This Is Not A Glitch - quoting this one here:

This does not wash for two reasons. One, a customer service rep admitted in writing this was “policy”. Saying it is a “glitch” or “not a new policy” is both disingenuous and outright patronizing.

Second, and more compelling reason: A “glitch” would have taken out other books–like, say, Mein Kampf or the disgusting “how to cure homosexuality” screeds. Instead, what we have is a specific targeted campaign, albeit a clumsy and not-very-well-thought-out one.

Now, if Amazon would have stuck to small-press GLBT and incrementally inched toward getting even Lady Chatterley off their search rankings, consumers might have been led further down the primrose path. As it is, between the admission of policy and the fact of the removal of search rankings to cut down the sales of “certain” titles, what we have here is not a glitch but a poorly-executed bit of fuckery that was in no way UNintentional. The only reason this hit big is because of the degree of fuckeration over a short period of time.