Many of you may have heard about the buzz on twitter today using the hashtag #amazonfail. There is a diary on the reclist about it. It strikes me that Amazon's mistakes are pretty apparent and were avoidable. It appears that Amazon has removed rankings and restricted searches for what they deem "adult" content. I should stress that while this appears to have been going on for a number of weeks, the real storm started today. As of this moment, I'm not sure anyone except a few individuals at Amazon is 100% sure how/what is going on. However, the closest thing to a primary source we have is a blog post by author Mark Probst:
http://markprobst.livejournal.com/...
He noticed books with gay and lesbian themes disappearing from searches and missing rankings and asked why. He received the following response:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
more after the fold
This is cross-posted at my own blog/author site:
http://www.edwardgtalbot.com
It seems that Amazon has made at least two big mistakes. Possibly three. First, they decided that they need to censor Adult material, that is keep it out of their primary searches. It would not surprise me to learn that they have had some level of censorship all along, but this is clearly a substantial increase. They should have realized first of all that such a move was likely to ignite opposition and that with authors and writers and publishers embracing social media, that opposition would be loud and would build. Perhaps they thought they could slip it in without anyone noticing and ignore the opposition. Perhaps they still intend to do that. Time will prove this to be a mistake. In any case, completely removing a large group of titles from the main search rather than giving a checkbox as an option to exclude adult titles was dumb. Especially since all one has to do is search Books instead of the main search to find this stuff. Exactly how are they really protecting anyone? Somehow people searching All Departments need to be protected but people searching Books don't? Silliness.
Mistake number two is that to accomplish mistake #1, they decided to strip Amazon ranking from all the adult books. From a technical standpoint, it's easy to understand why they did this - it was the quickest way to eliminate the books from the main search. But taking the easy technical way out almost always comes back to bite you (I am a web developer when I'm not writing). And it sure is biting them here. Implementing that checkbox I mentioned quite possibly would require a lot more programming - I have no way of knowing, but I could picture it. Nevertheless, based on the response received by Mark Probst, it appears that the only reason to strip the rankings was as a means to their primary end of restricting searches. As such, it was dumb, dumb, dumb.
Amazon possibly made a third mistake here, and it is this one that has galvanized the most opposition. They decided that gay and lesbian material was adult material. Many people on twitter are convinced that this was an intentional swipe at the GLBT community. And possibly it was. At best it was extremely insensitive and effectively discriminatory. At worst, it was intentionally discriminatory. At this point, nothing I've seen is more than pure speculation about that.
So what will be the result of all this? Who the hell knows. I'd guess that Amazon will mostly back down: restore the rankings, do a better job defining Adult content, and not completely remove Adult content from default searches (with a checkbox or whatever). I find it hard to believe that they're getting enough pressure from whatever triggered this move to sustain them in the face of an industry for which censorship is one of the few uniting issues.
But I've been wrong before