Lilith Saintcrow

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)

Related posts:

1. Days Later, Still #amazonfail
2. Seattle PI has new #amazonfail statement
3. This Is Not A Glitch, #amazonfail

Tags: amazonfail, we are not amused

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Rant Rant Rave. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.