Ragged Feathers

Tomorrow I’ll be back to regular work and blogging (not a moment too soon, I think). I’m still utterly flabbergasted that Amazon shows no sign of offering an apology, and can only assume this means they’re okay with the communities who were directly insulted–LBGT, the disabled, feminists, authors and readers of several genres, etc.–being, well, directly insulted. This story broke on Saturday and we’ve had two very, very faint statements, neither of which had anything remotely resembling an apology in them. So I guess in Amazon’s world, being a huge online store with a chokegrasp on market share means never having to say you’re sorry.

They are, of course, free to stick their nose in the air and give the impression (warranted or not) that the deranking was deliberate, and not a big deal to them anyway. Consumers and content producers (authors and publishers) are equally free to draw their own conclusions and think hard about whether Amazon’s behavior is something to reward with continued patronage.

What We Know

As early as February (and as Dear Author points out, very probably as early as 2008) Amazon started taking the Sales Rank off books with so-called “adult” content. The sales rank is important because it allows the book to be searched for, listed with others in its category, and included in the “You Might Like” and “Bestseller” algorithms.

In other words, if your book is deranked, a customer can’t find it to buy it on the biggest Internet retailer–the one most people go to first.

At first, authors who protested were given short shrift and told the deranking was to “protect” Amazon’s customers from “adult content”. Then, over the past weekend, over fifty thousand books stopped showing up in searches. The deranked books were overwhelmingly in several categories: GLBT (gay, lesbian, bi, transgender), rape counseling, suicide prevention, disabilities, sex and disability, female sexuality, and feminism. Suddenly, you could no longer order these books (including Ellen DeGeneres’s autobiography, Stephen Fry’s biography, EM Forster’s Maurice, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Even searching by specific title or author often didn’t show them. Some versions of books remained, others from different publishers vanished.

Then the Internet noticed. More specifically, Twitter noticed. And then, to use a highly technical term, the shit hit the fan.

Literally thousands of people spread the news, weighed in in 140-character bursts, and started writing blog posts and making a stink. (There was even an Amazon Rank Googlebomb.) Amazon’s customer service phone lines and email centers were flooded with angry and inquiring communications.

Amazon said nothing. Reasonable for the first few hours, since it was Easter weekend. But then…

Theories flew fast and furious. Online reporters and media spread the story far and wide. The tweets, blog posts, and furor kept coming. And Amazon still said nothing, apparently paralyzed. Over the next two days Amazon offered two weak explanations: a “glitch” and a “ham-fisted cataloging error”. As of this writing, Amazon has said nothing else and the mainstream media has picked up the tale, including such oddities as a “hacker” who claimed to have caused the whole mess. (His claims were swiftly debunked.)

The deranked titles are beginning to slowly reappear. For a long while an odious “cure your children of homosexuality” screed was #1 in the “Homosexuality” category at Amazon. This was noted across the board–right wing or fundamentalist anti-gay books seemed to have escaped the deranking, adding to the oddity.

Why Have Search Rankings At All?

A question I do not see being asked much is: what is the point of having sales rankings if Amazon is going to “game” them by removing content it deems questionable? Even if they were trying to institute a “safe search” option, deranking even ONE book, no matter how good the reason, severely impacts the trust a consumer can feel in any Amazon sales ranking.

Jane at Dear Author says it best:

Ranking has importance because ranking helps dictate visibility. Visibility is vital for sales. Most people in book selling will tell you that the best advertisement a book has is its presence in a store. This is true for online retailing as well. If you can’t find it, you can’t buy it. #Amazonfail showed us that deranking books based on publisher supplied metadata can remove a book from front page searches, book page searches, suggested reads lists, and bestseller lists. #Amazonfail showed us that Amazon can internally tweak algorithms to place the content that it desires at the top of the lists. (Dear Author

Note this: The biggest online retailer has been caught trying to tweak algorithms to place content it desires at the top of the lists. Not content the customers have desired, content Amazon desired. We do not know how long subtle deranking may have gone on. We now do not know if any book called a “bestseller” in a certain category at Amazon truly was, or if certain books were hyped. The sales rankings, “You Might Like” lists, and bestseller lists now rest on a shaky foundation indeed. For a company that brays of being customer-centric with a site that is user-driven, the cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. If Amazon hadn’t committed a clumsy error in implementation, we may never have known that the results of the game were being, well, gamed.

Who Would It Profit?

Amazon has clearly had the ability to derank books for some time. Companies do not pay for and implement tools they do not intend to use. Stripping a sales rank and thereby stripping a book’s ability to be found on the biggest online retailer has serious implications, but just for a moment I want to consider how Amazon could possibly profit from this. (The fact that this clumsy debacle has cost Amazon money and goodwill does not enter into my calculations of how they could profit if they didn’t get caught.)

What about leverage? Specifically, what about leverage against publishers? “Opt in to our program (for a fee) and we can guarantee your books won’t be deranked/ made harder to find/ made harder to buy.” It’s simple, it’s easy, and a variant of this strong-arm method has been tried before by this very same company.

Do I think that’s what happened this time? Despite it being my pet theory, no. For one thing, I ran it past several industry people whose judgment I trust (my agent, my beta reader, some fellow authors) and their consensus is best expressed thus:

I suspect that the truth is a little more prosaic. Deranking books as a strong arm tactic is something they’re perfectly capable of and they’ve done it before … This particular mess I believe was caused by a scenario very similar to what is postulated by Patrick Neilson Hayden. They wanted to keep “dirty” stuff off the main page and someone went through … and reclassified a lot of tags (queer, erotic, sexuality, who knows what all) as “adult” meaning incredibly dirty, and then they all went poof …

[If they wanted an safe-search option]What they need to do is to put a separate tag that says this is sexually explicit porn you can’t even look at in most states unless you’re 18 (or do it state by state, most people are logged into their Amazon account, so they know what the law is there), and make you say at one point, perhaps when setting up the account, “yep, I want to see the dirty stuff,” [or] “nope that stuff squigs me right out”. But that would be very very cumbersome and they tried to take a short cut that just blew up spectacularly in their faces.

Which I think is a good thing actually. Because while I don’t think there was evil intent here, I think they’re totally capable of strong arming, monopolistic evilness and now everyone’s watching. (from a personal email)

We now absolutely know they possess the capability. And once corporations get past a certain number of cars in the parking lot, they stop behaving like groups of reasonable individuals and take on a life and aims of their own, behaving very much according to their own peculiar desire for profit and survival (including getting bigger and squeezing out competition, two things corporations naturally wish for). Just as naturally, informed consumers don’t want only one supplier because it robs them of the power of choice. The tension between these two normal drives makes (however imperfectly) for any social responsibility a corporation may be said to possess. It’s not altruism, it’s survival.

Now that we know Amazon can and will play dirty pool, do we want to let them stay at the table?

The Question Of Majority

Slight aside: I don’t particularly mind the idea of a “safe search” function, though I wouldn’t use it. Sex toys and heterosexual porn were unaffected by the derankings, which is an argument against it being an innocent “glitch”. But the wider question is, who exactly is in the majority?

Despite rules against filth, obscenity, etc., etc., people buy sex toys and porn in great quantities. If Amazon is looking to filter search results so we don’t see that porn and sex toys are going to outsell in possibly every category they’re put in, what does that tell us about ourselves? I wish we would see more of this angle being discussed–the sheer amount of money spent on nookie and porn, and how this perhaps indicates that the sexless Leave It To Beaver fantasies of conservatives and fundamentalists are just that–fantasies. Not a majority, and not an accurate indicator of human experience.

Despite this being a fascinating topic, I’m moving on. But just…think about it, would you?

Monoculture

A significant portion of the reaction to AmazonFail was and remains “Buy Indie!” This is probably best expressed in Patrick of Vroman.net’s essay AmazonFail and the Cost of Freedom:

In the world of ecommerce, the search is king. Almost everybody who shops online visits a site to find a specific product. By intentionally obscuring and manipulating the search results of your site, you are making a clear statement: We don’t want you to read these books. I can tell you from experience that if something is difficult to find through a search, it will not sell. Not only was this a suspicious action on Amazon’s part, it had the potential to be very “successful” (ie, it would’ve greatly decreased the sales of those titles).

I know you think I’m overreacting. You say, “So what? They’ll list the books again, and surely they won’t be stupid enough to try something like this again. After all, we caught them, didn’t we?” True…this time. My point still stands. Concentration of power is a dangerous thing. “But what if it was a hacker?” I think the point still stands. This is the proverbial putting of eggs in too few baskets. I think independent publisher sales rep John Mesjak put it best when he tweeted this statement: “I haven’t read all of #amazonfail, so I am likely repeating, but my takeaway: this S#!T happens with monoculture gatekeepers. Go IndieBound!”

It’s worth noting that Mesjak uses the word “monoculture” here, a word derived from agriculture. It’s taken us some thirty years (since the passage of Earl Butz’s “Get Big or Get Out” Farm Bill in the 1970s) to realize that having a few corporations control our food supply was a really bad idea. (link)

Two sites, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (a site I often read) and Dear Author (who I have quoted several times during this whole thing) have made the decision to become IndieBound affiliates instead of Amazon affiliates. As Dear Author explains:

Words without action have no meaning. While it is true, to some extent, that Amazon can sell whatever it likes consumers have those same unfettered choices in their book buying decisions. Yes, Amazon makes it incredibly easy to buy books at its site but at some point, consumers can and will get fed up enough to take their dollars elsewhere. Dear Author is going to start working with IndieBound even though Amazon Affiliate dollars is the only income that DA earns. I know that SmartBitches will be doing the same although it represents a pretty significant financial loss to them. (link)

After much thought I have decided to do the same. There will still be Amazon links to my books on my site, since I am here to serve readers (and several readers may still make the choice to patronize Amazon) and I am not going to go back and find every. Single. Link. Though the affiliate program at Amazon was never a consistent source of financial help for me (what, a latte a month if I was lucky?) I was still driving traffic to them. I’m making the choice instead to drive that traffic to IndieBound.

I am not at the stage of complete boycott just yet, though I’ve emptied out my Amazon shopping cart–I am waiting for what Amazon will eventually say about this, if anything, before I make that decision–but this episode has shown me how dangerous a monoculture could be to my health.

After all, the books that I depend on for my livelihood–and to feed my kids-could have been deranked. It could have been me. I am invested in a healthy economy and a healthy industry because it maximizes my chances both as a writer and a consumer.

Just as Amazon is naturally interested in their bottom line.

What Amazon Should Do

1. Apologize. I can’t say it loudly and often enough–the longer Amazon goes without offering at least a token apology (notice I am not naive enough to wish for a sincere one), the more goodwill it squanders, and the worse it looks.
2. Explain what happened. In detail. In plain English. Taking responsibility for bad choices.
3. Vow to go on with transparency around sales rankings, and do so. Explain how and why books are deranked and what an author can do to challenge a deranking. (That is, if they’re going to derank at ALL.)
4. Apologize again, first and last, specifically to the communities affected–the GLBT community, health professionals and rape counselors, the disabled, sex educators, erotica and YA authors…you get the idea.

The longer this goes on, the more Amazon looks like a callous, heartless Henry Potter to the plucky George Bailey of readers and authors. Or a soulless corporate monolith who doesn’t care what it crushes as long as profits are up. This may not be the truth–but if you as a huge company fuck up this hugely and don’t at least say “I’m sorry” and try to do better, what do you expect to be seen as?

Me, Personally

I’m actually thrilled at the grassroots response, despite plenty of people decrying it as a rush to judgment. Direct outrage over the disenfranchisement of minorities who are still under siege in many parts of the world is a good thing. I do not think it detracts from the struggle for human equality. Far from.

I personally do not think this was an “innocent” glitch, for reasons I have stated at length. I spy something lurking behind these events that might not be exactly sinister (for it is perfectly normal for corporations to seek to maximize their profits and to do so in bumbling hamfisted ways that are not completely thought out) but is certainly troubling. Even if I’m wrong (and I fully admit I think my friends stand a better chance of being right, for I am a suspicious old cynic), each one of my friends noted the same thing–that Amazon has been caught with the means to covertly game the sales ranking and we’d be fools to think they haven’t used it in the past or will not use it in the future.

My anonymous friend above said it all: Because while I don’t think there was evil intent here, I think they’re totally capable of strong arming, monopolistic evilness and now everyone’s watching.

I hope we don’t look away.

Amazonfail posts (of which this hopefully will be the last):

1. Amazon Censors Search Rankings To “Protect” Us
2. This Is Not A Glitch
3. Still Not A Glitch, But A Policy
4. (Update) Idiosyncratic Code?
5. Why I’m Bothering With AmazonFail
6. (Update) Seattle PI releases Amazon statement
7. Glitch, Ranking, & Porn
8. Days Later, Still AmazonFail
9. Glitch, Monoculture, Profit (AmazonFail Recap)

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Links first, and then the meat.

* ScienceBlogs’ Janet Stemwedel on AmazonFail, very worth reading.
* NYT has “discovered” Twitter.
* Jezebel with another thoughtful update. I just like Jezebel more and more all the time.
* And SmartBitches with a three-pointer from downtown.

I know I’ve said it ad nauseum, but it bears repeating. Why does Amazon have sales ranks at all if they’re going to “game the system” by deranking books? By now it is well established that there was a policy of deranking “adult” books as early as February. If those books are selling at all, why strip them of their sales ranks?

Do not tell me it is to protect the tender feelings of those who shop at Amazon–those who are over 18, have their own credit/debit cards, and can close a bloody browser window if they see Lady Chatterley coming over the hill. (Pun kind of intended.) The sales ranks were only a logical base for “You Might Like” algorithms OR for consumer information if we trusted they weren’t being gamed.

The second component to my mistrust has been boiling ever since AmazonFail first broke. Where is Amazon’s response? On one level the absence of any communication from the biggest online retailer (the one that made its fortune being ahead of the Internet curve) says that maybe they were scrambling to find someone who could Deal With The Situation. But come on. This is a billion-dollar company with PR flacks. The silence seems intentional, and it seems utterly unlikely that the best they could do was a faint whisper of “glitch” on PW. The evident paralysis could be a combination of Easter weekend (though the timing–the massive deranking happening on a holiday weekend and all–is circumstantially fishy enough) and a type of “hand caught in the cookie jar”. Amazon must have believed they would not get caught, because so far their deranking had gone smoothly.

Not only that, but we have a lack of ANY APOLOGY AT ALL. If Amazon fucked up, all they had to do was say, “We messed up, we apologize, here is what we are doing to fix it.” Instantly three-quarters of the brouhaha fades and a great many people will take a deep breath and say, “Oh they apologized, maybe it wasn’t intentional…” Which was a strand commonly heard even in the heat of AmazonFail, during twenty tweets every twelve seconds for hours and hours. No apology? They had a policy in place for responding to small-press erotica or GLBT authors who protested being deranked in February, but no response now? Hand in cookie jar, blushing and stammering. Real confusion and innocence would have been a little, well, louder.

The third and biggest component to my mistrust is the targeted nature of the derankings. GLBT in general. Disability issues, especially around the thorny questions of sex and disability. Gay parenting. Rape trauma, suicide prevention among gay teens.

If these things had category code words that were targeted as part of a truly innocent fuckup, why didn’t homophobia in the form of the odious “teach your children not to be gay” book that was #1 in the Homosexuality category get deranked? Right-wing fundie nonsense, Playboy and Penthouse, het porn stars–these were left alone. I’ve seen Jane’s spreadsheet over at Dear Author, and it seems to me the data points to something targeted a little too finely to be innocent. How, precisely, did books with exactly the same words, same categories, etc., EXCEPT a right-wing or fundie slant, get left behind?

There was an agenda here married to stupidity, and the institutional stupidity that overstepped its planned-for bounds should not blind us to the agenda. Whether it was squeezing out small-press erotica and GLBT authors until they agreed to go through Amazon’s POD service (something that has been nagging in the back of my head for a little while) or a clumsy attempt at net-nannying that got blown way past common sense in middle management or during a Starbucks-fueled meeting one day and just snowballed before being hijacked for someone’s agenda (what I think is a little more likely) OR Amazon caving to pressure to get “adult” books (translation: anything the truly hideous “Focus On The Family” set can find to disagree with) safely squeezed out of the biggest online retailer…well, none of these is an appetizing explanation.

Here’s another thing I’m kicking around inside my noggin: if there is so much filthy filthy porn that it’s choking up Amazon’s bestseller lists, who is really in the majority here? People who are shocked and horrified at anything remotely sexual, or people who (as people have since recorded history began) will buy porn, more and more when they’re more and more repressed?

Yes, I know. The whole point of this was a disproportionate and clumsy wide-brush spasm by Amazon, deranking things like Heather Has Two Mommies and Maurice while leaving Penthouse and Playboy centerfolds and Ron Jeremy’s autobiography. But the ancillary question I can’t stop mulling is: who is really in the majority here? The MSM perception of the conservative fundie message as the norm is cracking under the strain of transparency about what people are ACTUALLY buying. Is this whole mess a symptom of that, and a symptom of discomfort over said transparency?

I’m still mulling all this over. And waiting for a response from Amazon with some actual, you know, information in it. It had damn well better include an apology, too. With as much as I spend on books in a year, Barnes and Noble and Alibris, not to mention Powell’s and Booksamillion, will be very happy to have me. Not to mention my closest local indie bookseller.

Viva la Internets.

ETA: An Amazon employee anonymously talks to Seattle PI. Hmmm. One field “accidentally” flipped?

1. Amazon Censors Search Rankings To “Protect” Us
2. This Is Not A Glitch
3. Still Not A Glitch, But A Policy
4. (Update) Idiosyncratic Code?
5. Why I’m Bothering With AmazonFail
6. (Update) Seattle PI releases Amazon statement
7. Glitch, Ranking, & Porn
8. Days Later, Still AmazonFail
9. Glitch, Monoculture, Profit (AmazonFail Recap)

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

There are reports coming in about sales rankings reappearing (I see Beecroft’s book is back up) and a few people tweeting “We WON!”. I am reserving judgment–there is no “winning” when we don’t know what happened (though Mike Daisey has some scoop from an Amazon employee) and Amazon thinks people can be fobbed off. Not to mention that the #1 book in “Homosexuality” is, as of this writing, the odious “Guide” to “preventing” it.

Now. Why am I bothering with AmazonFail when I’ve got work to do? For a number of reasons. Here’s an incomplete list of them:

1. It’s hard enough to make rent as a writer. The income lost from this might cause other GLBT, disability, feminine sexuality, or feminist books not to be written, simply because the writer can’t afford to–because they can’t get their books sold through the biggest online retailer.

2. To order from Amazon, you have to be over 18 and have credit card information. (You CAN send in a check, but banks check ID too, you know.) Classifying some material as “adult” and therefore unsearchable on a site that caters exclusively to people over a reasonable age of consent…um, does not compute. Amazon setting itself up as moral guardian of everyone who shops their site will lose them a lot of business. Because it is infuriating, nannyish, and stupid. Powell’s doesn’t talk down to me, and neither does BN.

3. Amazon’s handling of this whole thing expresses (whether they intend it to or not) complete and utter disdain for the people paying for their services.

4. When Heather Has Two Mommies is made unsearchable and unbuyable and Playboy Centerfolds are not, we get a clear message about priorities and double standards. We also get a clear message when the company in question does not respond for days, and offers only faint and transparent-pale excuses when they DO respond.

5. This follows a pattern we’ve seen before from Amazon–”first test picking off the little people, then present to big customers/publishers as a fait accompli. Corporations will try this, if they can get away with it. It is up to consumers and content producers to stop them in their tracks.

6. I will be blunt: self-interest. What if it was my books that got deranked? Amazon.com isn’t the be all and end all of my book sales, but it does represent a chunk. I am vigilant about this sort of nasty dealing because sooner or later, if I said nothing, it would affect my ability to feed my kids as a writer. And I’m not standing for that.

This is only an incomplete list. I’m curious: what are your reasons for following/reasons this is important? I know I’ve missed a few.

1. Amazon Censors Search Rankings To “Protect” Us
2. This Is Not A Glitch
3. Still Not A Glitch, But A Policy
4. (Update) Idiosyncratic Code?
5. Why I’m Bothering With AmazonFail
6. (Update) Seattle PI releases Amazon statement
7. Glitch, Ranking, & Porn
8. Days Later, Still AmazonFail
9. Glitch, Monoculture, Profit (AmazonFail Recap)

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

AmazonFail proceeds apace. It’s almost 11AM Monday and still no response from Amazon about why they censored search rankings on GLBT, disability, feminist, feminist sexuality, and classic titles. Theories about this being just a huge trollage are running around, the most reasonable of which is tehdely’s.

I still do not buy the “glitch” and I do not buy trollage. Let me explain why.

Jane at Dear Author has a spreadsheet on the metadata most likely used to yank significant numbers of books. This does kick the trollage theory squarely in the pants, as this kind of thing–yanking whole categories–is not a catch-as-catch-can solution. Someone had to make a decision, allot resources, check, and implement it. This doesn’t happen overnight. (The other trollage theory–the one with an Internet jerkwad “taking responsibility” for the whole thing–is debunked here.)

When you add in the fact that Craig Seymour got talking points in February about protecting the hoi polloi readership and Mark Probst getting talking points on Saturday before this whole thing blew up, what you have is not a glitch but a policy. I repeat: Talking points in place for a specific complaint is not a glitch. It is a marker of a policy. Just look at the initial responses Seymour got when he complained of deranking in February. Go look, I’ll wait.

Now. Do you remember the Amazon POD fiasco? Cliffs Notes version: Amazon tried to take over a significant chunk of the print-on-demand industry by quietly removing “buy” buttons from small-press POD publishers who didn’t use Amazon’s POD service. The buttons would come back–if you switched to Amazon’s POD service, in essence giving them a bigger cut. It was greed pure and simple, and they started it with smaller presses and only backed off when there was a bit of a hullabaloo and larger presses (who still use POD technology) banded together to tell Amazon where to stick it.

We have the same pattern with AmazonFail. First very small press/authors are targeted, probably to gauge how big of a stink they’ll raise. If Amazon is not convinced the outcry will outweigh the (perhaps perceived) profits, it slowly mounts until Amazon has captured what it wants. The fact that Amazon has shot itself in the foot with this does not mean it wasn’t a deliberate step taken with another end in mind.

The only thing that has made AmazonFail so huge is that Amazon tried to move too fast. Had they slowly added small-press titles instead of clumsily employing a blanket deranking, this would have been a slow-simmer at best. Clumsy, egregiously offensive implementation has given us a chance to stop this in its tracks.

The silence coming from Amazon at the moment is being taken in many quarters as pure disdain. I am not sure I disagree.

Patrick at Making Light has pointed out the reasons why he doesn’t believe this was a Huge Conspiracy, either. I agree with qualifications. Once a corporation passes a certain number of cars in the parking lot, it becomes more of an organism than a group of individuals, and acts accordingly, with occasionally shocking bad judgment. (The liver of any partying college student would attest to this.) However, this does not excuse the open discrimination against GLBT, disability, and sexuality titles. As Patrick states:

None of which means that anyone shouldn’t be mad at Amazon, or that Amazon shouldn’t be embarrassed. Rather, it means that this is how the world works. A great deal of racism, homophobia, etc., happens not because anyone particularly wants to be racist or homophobic, but because the ground has been tilted that way by arrangements made long ago and if you’re not constantly on the lookout it’s easiest to roll downhill. (Making Light)

On the other hand, the lack of taking responsibility (still no statement from Amazon) and the expectation that thousands of people will be fobbed off with the excuse that it was “just a glitch” have by now assumed truly absurd proportions. The better response would be “Obviously we’ve fucked up. A full explanation and a fix will be available _____, or you will know why. Please accept our apologies.”

But I get the odd feeling that apologies–or meaningful action–may be long in coming.

Up next: Why AmazonFail Is Important

Now, links!

* Dear Author on metadata filters
* Wall Street Journal gets into the act
* The Guardian’s piece
* The oddly-hypnotic Twittersearch for #amazonfail, with several new tweets every minute–still
* Amazon Rank (Because that’s part of the fun of having your own blog.)
* Making Light’s Patrick on AmazonFail
* Trollbusting
* Kuri-ousity’s very good post
* Erica Friedman on what to DO about all this

ETA: Code garble fixed. Thanks!

1. Amazon Censors Search Rankings To “Protect” Us
2. This Is Not A Glitch
3. Still Not A Glitch, But A Policy
4. (Update) Idiosyncratic Code?
5. Why I’m Bothering With AmazonFail
6. (Update) Seattle PI releases Amazon statement
7. Glitch, Ranking, & Porn
8. Days Later, Still AmazonFail
9. Glitch, Monoculture, Profit (AmazonFail Recap)

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Well, I’m breaking my rule about posting on Sundays. Here’s the situation:

Amazon.com decided, over the holiday weekend, to strip many titles they considered “adult” of sales rankings, making them impossible to find through Amazon’s search function. This is disproportionately affecting GLBT titles.

Books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Bastard Out Of Carolina have also been tagged as “adult” and removed from search rankings. They told Mark Probst it was to “protect” readers. Writers such as Maya Banks, Larissa Ione, and Jaci Burton have been affected. (Here’s Dear Author with updates. Meta Writer is also updating a list of writers affected.)

This is utter bullshit. In the first place, Amazon doesn’t have the right to try to police what we buy. Amazon seems to forget that we’re the people it’s supposed to be serving–and right now I’m speaking as a consumer, not an author.

As an author, the “this is utter bullshit” just gets more intense. For crying out loud. Brokeback Mountain, unsearchable and hence almost unbuyable through Amazon? The Well Of Loneliness? Come on. And for the sake of sweet Auntie Louise, you don’t need to f!cking protect me or anyone else from GLBT fiction.

Jeez. You can buy freaking sex toys on Amazon (though I prefer Babeland, personally), and they’re trying to dictate what we can buy to read?

I take a very dim view of anyone doing this, and Amazon’s status as the corporation most likely to shortchange small-press authors (oh, don’t even get me started about the POD thing not too long ago) and/or take over the world a la Skynet doesn’t help.

The Smart Bitches are now Googlebombing Amazon. (Entry and explanation here, googlebomb here: Amazon Rank.)

I’m horrified but not particularly shocked. This seems to be a decision taken in a meeting that got passed through a bunch of oatmeal-brained yesmen and has ended up opening a sh!tstorm. Amazon is making more and more of these decisions, and I think it’s telling that this is breaking over a holiday weekend when everyone (except those of us who read fiction someone gets their tit in a wringer about, apparently) is supposed to be in church or hanging out with their families.

So, go. Googlebomb. And let Amazon know you know what they’re up to: Amazon executive customer service email is: ecr@amazon.com and the customer service phone number is 1-800-201-7575. Dear Author has a template for a letter you can send, too, that’s pretty good. Be polite, but be firm. Do not let them get away with this.

Because if they haven’t already, next time they will take your books–either the ones you like to read, or the ones you write. And yeah, you can just sell them elsewhere–but Amazon is in this to serve US. Let’s not let them forget that, mmmkay?

ETA: Just got confirmation that a(n egregiously offensive) book titled “A Parent’s Guide To Preventing Homosexuality” is still searchable and sales-ranked through Amazon. Could we be any more blatant with the agenda, Amazon? I am now moving past horrified to outright disgusted.

ETA: As of right now, I’m getting some reports of a few books like Brokeback Mountain have had their rankings returned and are now searchable. However, I don’t find that Brokeback has any ranking when I check Amazon.com. We’ll see.

1. Amazon Censors Search Rankings To “Protect” Us
2. This Is Not A Glitch
3. Still Not A Glitch, But A Policy
4. (Update) Idiosyncratic Code?
5. Why I’m Bothering With AmazonFail
6. (Update) Seattle PI releases Amazon statement
7. Glitch, Ranking, & Porn
8. Days Later, Still AmazonFail
9. Glitch, Monoculture, Profit (AmazonFail Recap)

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.