Omega Point

#Amazonfail

A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by hav­ing it shipped to her address in Wash­ing­ton to take advan­tage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offer­ing to US-based cus­tomers. I ended up sav­ing some­thing like $60. Sweet. Deal.

So, my first Ama­zon sale com­pleted, I was feel­ing pretty pos­i­tive about them. Until yesterday.

Sun­day morn­ing, I was alerted to news of a some­what poorly-planned deci­sion at Ama­zon: to bet­ter cater to America’s “moral major­ity”, Ama­zon decided to excise the pop­u­lar­ity rank­ings of LGBT books, delist­ing them from search results. Some authors’ books can only be found by search­ing for an unre­lated title and click­ing on the author’s name. Other authors’ entire selec­tions have been delisted.

Accord­ing to a thread on Livejournal’s Meta Writer com­mu­nity, Ama­zon has de-ranked such titles as Broke­back Moun­tain, Tip­ping the Vel­vet and Stone Butch Blues. This  begs the ques­tion: what on earth are these shel­tered, big­oted Ama­zon cus­tomers search­ing for that is going to make them get all red-faced and choke down vomit upon dis­cov­er­ing those books in their search results?

“Well, I never!” they’ll exclaim, spit­tle fly­ing forth, “I wanted to read about the non-gay his­tory of Broke­back Moun­tain! How was I to know it was fictional?”

In his blog post on the sub­ject, Raul (Hummingbird604) com­pares the move by Ama­zon to last year’s “Motrin Moms” deba­cle. He also raises the ques­tion, is Easter Sun­day a good time to be orga­niz­ing a protest? Absolutely. Is Easter Sun­day an okay time for Ama­zon PR to take the day off? Obvi­ously not.

Worse, Amazon’s responses have ranged from “yes, we de-rank adult con­tent” to “uh, it’s a glitch?” They haven’t demon­strated any cohe­sive strat­egy to man­ag­ing their response, and con­tinue to look worse and worse, the longer this goes on.

Since break­ing Sun­day morn­ing, the #ama­zon­fail and #glitch­myass hash­tags on Twit­ter con­tinue to trend highly a day later, invit­ing responses from Amazon’s competitors.

Amidst a flurry of sug­ges­tions that they hold a sale on LGBT books, Pow­ells Books’ Twitt­ter account notes that they will def­i­nitely not cen­sor the pres­ence of LGBT mate­r­ial on their site.

@cin­e­mae­stro That cer­tainly is dis­turb­ing. For­tu­nately, Powell’s will never cen­sor this mate­r­ial #ama­zon­fail http://bit.ly/3Me5Un

about 7 hours ago in reply to cinemaestro

@zenti­nal A GLBT sale sounds like a great idea to me. I will check to see if this is some­thing we can get going #amazonfail

about 6 hours ago in reply to zentinal

By Mon­day morn­ing, the main­stream media was already report­ing on the issue:

• Ama­zon blames ‘glitch’ for removal of gay titles from sales rank­ings, CBC
• ‘Gay writ­ing’ falls foul of Ama­zon sales rank­ing sys­tem, Guardian.co.uk
• Ama­zon web­site cen­sor­ship row, Chan­nel 4

Oh, and per Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’ advice: Ama­zon Rank

Update, April 13, 2:50pm:
An email from an Amazon.com spokesman, repro­duced by the Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer, describes #Ama­zon­fail as “an embar­rass­ing and ham-fisted cat­a­loging error for a com­pany that prides itself on offer­ing com­plete selection.”

The email goes on to say that a total of 57,310 books out­side of the Gay & Les­bian cat­e­gories were der­anked and that they’re in the process of rein­stat­ing them.

So what hap­pened? Did some mid-level man­ager enact some crazy new pol­icy? Can Amazon’s rank­ing and report­ing mech­a­nisms be gamed?