Amazon's New Official Policy: Discriminate against GLBT books/authors/issues

[susan]

It's not just hot, it's the hammer that will take down all civilization. That and Heather Has Two Mommies, of course.

[susan]

Appended to re-send of e-mail to Amazon:

I'd hoped for at least a form letter response to my e-mail of yesterday. Here it is again. I'd like to note that every hour that passes without a plausible press release from Amazon, giving a realistic explanation that includes the discrepancies now widely identified in the media, decreases my trust in Amazon and my interest in remaining a customer, despite having placed over 100 orders in the past.

[Zuul]

There's a claim that it was an innocent mix-up due to confusion from a French programmer. I call absolute bullshit on this one, quite frankly. As we have seen from looking at the data earlier, that claim can't possibly account for what was stripped of rank and what wasn't.

[pepperlandgirl]

Amazon apologized/explained, sorta.
http://www.lilithsaintcrow.com/journal/ ... statement/

Some titles have been restored. Others haven't (mine hasn't). But due to the law of unintended consequences, one of my title that was not stripped of its rank went right up to the top of the best seller list (currently #3 in gay literature and #1 in adult fiction. heh). One the one hand, not having any competition was nice. On the other hand, everybody is boycotting Amazon now so that doesn't actually help me.

[Zuul]

No real apology and their "error" managed to leave massive amounts of pornography while stripping far more innocuous material. What was the point of all of this? And why couldn't they just say, "Oops, our bad" yesterday? A problem of this magnitude, which is upsetting this many people, and nobody could do anything until Monday afternoon? Something like this might just require cutting Easter dinner short and making a statement to put people at ease.

And why, precisely, did this error take place over a holiday weekend anyway? Lower traffic for implementing cataloging changes? The hope that it would slip under the radar? What?

Also, nothing in that statement explains the letters about "adult" material. Especially since the porn was still there.

I'm still irritably awaiting answers.

[susan]

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that
prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed
titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such
as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This
problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected
not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's
main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder
as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this
kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.


Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

[Zuul]

I received the same letter, from an address you can't reply to, which was a nice touch. There isn't one word of apology in that statement, so I'm still awaiting a better gesture on their part. I'm prepared to be waiting for a long time, though, so I suppose I'll be supporting other bookstores in the meantime. Not a bad idea anyway, since it hurts the entire publishing industry for people to rely too heavily on a single outlet.

[mozg]

And here's what that French programmer has to say about the whole thing:

http://consumerist.com/5210378/amazon-g ... aims-troll

[susan]

I believe the trolling claim was debunked yesterday by several people who tried the code provided and demonstrated that it doesn't work.

[Exy]

It may not have been the result of someone deliberately misusing a "report adult item" button (since I don't remember there ever being such a button) but it's nuts to think that the people who actually make decisions thought all gay-themed books should be hidden away (or, rather, some gay-themed books, since there were plenty that never got delisted). Amazon is not exactly a staunch advocate for social conservatism. Some programmer wasn't supervised quite tight enough and whatever metadata they store on books got used inappropriately. It's not the end of the world. It's not even a big deal. Ten years ago people wouldn't have even cared.

Settle down, straight people. Take some deep breaths. It'll all be okay.

[Zuul]

Also, if it had been a troll, I don't believe Amazon would have sent me the lame explanation that susan quotes above. If it was a troll, anyone within that company with sense would have been shouting it from the rooftops and shaming the angry masses into being sympathetic towards Amazon.

[featherlou]

I get all my books, cds and dvds that I order online from Chapters. Just sayin'.

[pepperlandgirl]

There are lots of reasons to be upset over this. And those reasons vary. I'll admit, my main concern is purely selfish. It's hard enough to sell books and make a living without Amazon deciding to hide them for The Greater Good. Somebody at Amazon decided to do something with 50,000+ books featuring sexuality. Whether they meant to hide them or something else, I don't know. The reason it looks like a GLBT issue is that the first people to realize it and start contacting people (and create a petition) was GLBT authors Erastes and Alex Beecroft (they've been obsessively following their Amazon ranks with their new books...). When they discovered that they were missing rankings, Mark Probst's blog about the email he received from Amazon hit. They're big names in the gay romance/YA (respectively) community and so when they started sounding the alarm, it got heard and picked up far and wide. That's why it looked like they were targeting GLBT books. If somebody who wrote feminist theory books picked up on it first, maybe the hubbub would have been about how Amazon discriminates against women. I don't know.

My point, however, is that an Amazon rep admits that they tweak standings/tags in order to promote family friendly stuff (to be like Wal-Mart...actually WalMart refused to stock our first mass market book....fucking Walmart) and to hide books dealing with "sexuality." I'm not convinced this was an error, insofar as they didn't know what they were doing. I think they wanted to remove any "questionable" material from showing up with an "all departments" search. They got caught, so I guess it's back to the "tweaking."

[Exy]

I get that it's something upsetting, and obviously authors who are hurt by this have my sympathy. Although I'm not clear on exactly why losing your sales rank hurts you -- if you're ranked 143,612 then it's not like people are going to find you in the bestsellers, and if you're a bestseller, well, congratulations.

But you bringing up Wal-Mart is a great example of something way the fuck worse. Wal-Mart refuses to stock emergency contraception. That means that the portion of the population that only has access to a pharmacy at Wal-Mart (I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the millions!) can't buy emergency contraception.

Even if we just limit ourselves to gay rights issues, it's such a minor thing. Even if we impute the absolute worst motives to Amazon, which I think is unrealistic, it just seems like the absolute smallest issue facing queers in this country. It just seems so bourgeois to even worry about something like this. Gee, gay people are less visible at a popular online bookseller. If that were the worst thing to happen to us all day, I'd be very, very happy.

[jali]

I got that non-apologetic form letter too. Now I'm even more annoyed with Amazon.

[pepperlandgirl]

Not having my sales rank hurts me because that's how Amazon generates search results, as well as "You might also like..." results, and "Readers who looked at this item also bought...." results. So if my book isn't ranked, and you search for "gay historicals" from the first page, it won't show up as search results. When it wasn't ranked, if you searched for "A Hidden Beauty" from the books page, the only thing that would show up was the Kindle version, not the paperback. Now, if you wanted to buy that book, and you don't own a kindle, you might just shrug and move on, instead of digging even deeper to try to find the paperback that may or may not exist (as somebody who publishes with e-pubs, not all my books are in paperback form).

Spread that over 50,000 books and all of a sudden, you have a real problem. I was searching for de-ranked books for most of Sunday and Monday, and the sheer number of gay authors--some of which were friends, some colleagues, some just great writers that I love--that were suddenly "hidden" was more than a little disheartening.

It seems that you're arguing more from a civil rights issue, which makes sense. A lot of people were, and that's how it was starting to look. But it isn't just a queer thing. It's obviously part of a larger problem. Amazon was doing something with all of these books that feature "sexuality," including with some of the most popular, most well-known, and most important titles. Why? What the hell was going on? Writers and readers both should be concerned until Amazon actually clarifies what the hell they were up to.

[Exy]

So basically if the book is delisted, it's essentially completely unfindable -- because it'll never recommend it, and the book doesn't even show up in search results? That makes it a little clearer to me why authors are upset (I would be too!) but it just increases my conviction that it must have been accidental, or at least not intended by the people running the site -- why bother listing essentially every book that you could possibly find to sell if you're just going to make a substantial portion of them invisible?

[OtakuLoki]

While I'm concerned about the civil rights implications, they're pretty minor for me - a matter of principle, but not one that affects me directly.

What I'm pissed about is that Amazon is claiming, in the name of protecting their customers from disturbing thoughts, that they know better what people will be searching for than their customers do. I didn't like the way they used to sort their search results, but aside from the one trait - popularity - I could believe it was an otherwise unbiased sort. That I could trust their results to be free of prejudice about what I should or should not be reading. This tweaking of their ranking numbers is going far beyond being an annoying idiosyncrasy - It's a deliberate shuffling off of books to a back room. Not only that, it's bloody incompetent filtering: You still get searches coming up with Justine, and I find it hard to imagine that there is much in modern LGBT lit that's going to be more shocking to straight-laced sensibilities than that.

Of course, at the moment, I've got A Hidden Beauty's paperback version showing up at the top of the search for those words. Perhaps they're backpedaling further.

[pepperlandgirl]

That's because the sales-rank was returned to it yesterday evening. A similar search would have only brought up the Kindle version on Saturday, Sunday, and yesterday morning.

[Exy]

Perhaps they're backpedaling further.

They're not backpedaling, Internet Activist Guy. There's no evidence that what happened was deliberate.

[Zuul]

So basically if the book is delisted, it's essentially completely unfindable -- because it'll never recommend it, and the book doesn't even show up in search results? That makes it a little clearer to me why authors are upset (I would be too!) but it just increases my conviction that it must have been accidental, or at least not intended by the people running the site -- why bother listing essentially every book that you could possibly find to sell if you're just going to make a substantial portion of them invisible?

The only thing that makes sense to me is to assume the original plan had been to create two separate ranking systems--one for adult content and one for regular content--and they messed this up, big time. They didn't have another form of rank prepared to list those books and they shuffled off a lot of books that shouldn't have been removed from the standard rank.

Because, considering how much porn I can find on there, they clearly aren't trying to be entirely clean-cut, regardless of the Wal-Mart remarks I keep hearing tossed around. Type in "dildo" into the search box on Amazon. Think Wal-Mart's going to be offering those babies anytime soon? They're going to appeal to people's baser instincts and they're going to want to make money off of anything that's profitable.

But they aren't properly explaining themselves, so all people can do is make wild guesses or crazy conspiracy theories.

[hatesfreedom]

Even if we just limit ourselves to gay rights issues, it's such a minor thing. Even if we impute the absolute worst motives to Amazon, which I think is unrealistic, it just seems like the absolute smallest issue facing queers in this country. It just seems so bourgeois to even worry about something like this. Gee, gay people are less visible at a popular online bookseller. If that were the worst thing to happen to us all day, I'd be very, very happy.

Sweet lord a reasoned response. Thank you for that. The sky is indeed not falling.

[Exy]

Because, considering how much porn I can find on there, they clearly aren't trying to be entirely clean-cut, regardless of the Wal-Mart remarks I keep hearing tossed around. Type in "dildo" into the search box on Amazon.

No thanks. :smile: But, see, I at least take this as even more evidence -- they got the idea to delist adult items (and I don't have any problem with actual adult items not coming up on searches without people "opting in" somehow) and they did a terrible job of it, because they didn't have enough information to figure out what items actually are adult and what ones aren't. So, unsurprisingly, some things that shouldn't have been listed were, and some things that should (like that retrospective of Playboy centerfolds) weren't. Someone who didn't know what they were doing marked everything that was categorized as Gay & Lesbian as "adult", and they're seemingly trying to fix it now. It's not like Jeff Bezos suddenly just decided to show them queermos what's what.

[Zuul]

Because, considering how much porn I can find on there, they clearly aren't trying to be entirely clean-cut, regardless of the Wal-Mart remarks I keep hearing tossed around. Type in "dildo" into the search box on Amazon.

No thanks. :smile: But, see, I at least take this as even more evidence -- they got the idea to delist adult items (and I don't have any problem with actual adult items not coming up on searches without people "opting in" somehow) and they did a terrible job of it, because they didn't have enough information to figure out what items actually are adult and what ones aren't. So, unsurprisingly, some things that shouldn't have been listed were, and some things that should (like that retrospective of Playboy centerfolds) weren't. Someone who didn't know what they were doing marked everything that was categorized as Gay & Lesbian as "adult", and they're seemingly trying to fix it now. It's not like Jeff Bezos suddenly just decided to show them queermos what's what.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying there, because we're essentially agreeing.

If what they have said before is accurate, then they don't want those things to show up in their general searches, but do want them to be findable. They goofed up in their attempt to alter how their catalog worked. But--and here's the big but--they do still want to sell those things. They're not going to be like Wal-Mart. They're going to sell dildos and porn and erotic GLBT novels, because all of those things make money.

[Exy]

I think you misunderstood what I was saying there, because we're essentially agreeing.

If what they have said before is accurate, then they don't want those things to show up in their general searches, but do want them to be findable. They goofed up in their attempt to alter how their catalog worked. But--and here's the big but--they do still want to sell those things. They're not going to be like Wal-Mart. They're going to sell dildos and porn and erotic GLBT novels, because all of those things make money.

Oh, okay, yeah, I think I get you now. Sorry!

[Rube E. Tewesday]

So is there an update on this? My sole knowledge of it came from reading this board.

[susan]

It's too late for me to hunt up the cites, but

1. Many people don't believe that was a sufficient apology for censoring our reading materials without our knowledge.
2. Many people don't believe that it was a "glitch" unless the glitch was that they got caught.
3. More LGBTQ authors are describing trouble they've had with Amazon's rankings and other features in the past, including some who assert that when there were problems with non-LGBTQ books, Amazon was able to make changes, but with LGBTQ books, Amazon said that they couldn't manually enter database changes.
4. The groundswell has died, but some are boycotting nonetheless. For example, Amazon lost a $250 order for a couple of birthdays today, because we're not interested in supporting them until it's clear that some books are not more equal than others. This is what we'd do no matter what kind of authors appeared to to be targeted or glitched.

[pepperlandgirl]

There's also evidence that the same "glitch" has been happening with books on Kindle (since 2008), though I don't know how wide spread that is.