Seattle PI has new #amazonfail statement
The Seattle PI blog just posted a new statement from Amazon:
Amazon.com has offered a response to the AmazonFail fiasco.
Because there’s so much attention to this, I’ll offer spokesman Drew Herdener’s comments unfiltered:
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. (Seattle PI blog)
Um, anyone else seeing anything about that range of subjects being “impacted”?
ETA Okay, I’ve had a chance to think about this. And what I think is, this does not wash. No specifics, no real apology, minimizing the insult to the LBGT community and insulting the intelligence of their customers once again, while sidestepping the real question of why books were stripped of sales rankings back in February in the first place.
I keep running up against that, you see. Why strip books of rankings at all? Unless you’re seeking to control what people buy instead of offering a service. Tested with small-press or self-published authors before rolling out a massive change on a weekend–you know, the cynic in me says we’re not going to get an answer.
The optimist in me hopes there will be hubbub until we do get an answer.
ETA I apologize for all the ETAs, but I just can’t keep up with everything. Here’s ScienceBlog on AmazonFail.
And it’s fascinating to watch people spreading the already-debunked “hacker takes responsibility” story. Any thoughts on why that’s so attractive to a lot of people?
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:
Tags: amazonfail, we are not amused
April 13th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
OK this works as a partial explanation, but what about the authors who were informed as early as February that their books were being de-listed? I’m not quite sure how this can be written off as a catalogue error.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I think the oddest thing I saw was the deletion of rank for one version of Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
wendyz:
I think there are two issues: 1) is having a policy of filtering results with no cross checking or opt-in / opt-out.
2) Whether items have been correctly filtered.
It seems to me AMZN is currently addressing 2) and trying to finesse 1). “Ignore the man behind the curtain!”
Off-topic: I read The Demon’s Librarian last night, and enjoyed it.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I published a cozy mystery with a quilting theme. It contains not one iota of sex. It’s ranking was gone two weeks ago. So, the issue is broader than has been addressed if the “fix” is limited to the areas listed. And be it said this is a title that regularly sells a minimum of 50 copies a month, so the lack of ranking is important for it as well.
However, it also serves to indicate that there was nothing personal about what happened, which begs the question why apologies would be required to a specific segment of the population more than any other. A perceived insult isn’t the same as an actual one. Any book, regardless of subject matter or orientation of the author, that suffered from this debacle suffered in exactly the same way as all the others.
And before anyone starts pointing and yelling “homophobe,” I publish GLBT books. Which are actively labeled thus. And which have appeared via search results throughout the entire time period during which such works are alleged to have been “censored.”
April 13th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Seattle PI has it coming from Drew Herdener.
Edward Champion received the same exact statement from Patty Smith.
http://www.edrants.com/amazonfail-amazon-responds/
So is this amazon’s statement? Because if it is it leaves a lot to be desired.
April 13th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for the continued updates. I appreciate them.
I think there is an element of screw-up in what’s happened, because of the erratic way the ‘purge’ has been implemented. But it’s a very pointed kind of screw-up. Someone at Amazon decided to implement the code that stuffed all those books in the closet. And it was a distinctly hostile decision.
Like you, I think that Amazon’s statement ‘does not wash’. The reference to ‘broad categories’ of books affected seems like a deliberate attempt at misdirection. And the very least I want from them is an apology. A proper explanation would also be good.
In your last post you asked readers to say why we are bothering with this issue.
I am a lesbian. I am over fifty.
I remember when most of the lesbian characters in fiction were sinister, if not downright evil. (For a choice example in a ’serious’ novel, see the child-murdering couple in C. P. Snow’s The Sleep of Reason [1968].)
I remember when almost the only sympathetic lesbian characters I had encountered were Stephen in The Well of Loneliness and Leo and Helen in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies (US title The Middle Mist). (In both those books the lesbian relationship, though loving, is not allowed to last. )
I remember the middle seventies, when a few more lesbian-related books began to be available. At that time the titles were still so sparse I could, and did, purchase nearly all of them.
I remember the early eighties, when such books began to appear in greater numbers. Almost invariably they were published by specialist small presses, and they could usually only be bought at gay or radical bookshops.
Amazon may not have intended to de-rank each and every title they have recently de-ranked. But they certainly intended to fiddle with the rankings with the aim of producing misleading search results. And it cannot be doubted that their chief target was gay and lesbian books.
Amazon is turning the clock back in the direction of a time when gays and lesbians were routinely silenced, sidelined, and misrepresented by the dominant culture. I remember that time. I shall not easily forgive them for this episode.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Hi Lilith–
I’ve been following this and started out utterly appalled, then trying to be sympathetic and patient … and then I talked to a friend of mine who works at Amazon and who has actually seen the issue report. What he told me was necessarily and understandably limited by his confidentiality agreement with his employer, but, having worked in the tech industry myself, it makes sense.
First, Amazon sells in multiple countries. Each of those countries has different laws, which Amazon MUST follow, about what it is and is not legal to sell, which means that materials which might be legally banned in a non-US nation MUST be tagged as falling into the banned category. (Whether we agree or not.) Second, the Amazon infrastructure is necessarily all interconnected. Third, programmers and people doing data entry are human and sometimes make mistakes … and when you’re dealing with an infrastructure as huge as Amazon’s, a single goof can have a catastrophic effect.
Thus you end up with a situation where (for instance) “Heather has Two Mommies” is tagged as “adult” (because–and here’s the real problem–some countries DO consider gay issues to be “adult” and have passed laws saying so) and is then vulnerable to being delisted across Amazon as a whole when the progammer in question–who wasn’t even in the US at all–is attempting to delist a group of materials for a single country, *in order to comply with the laws of that nation*. (Please note that I’m inferring somewhat from what my friend told me; I did *not* receive this level of detail. The general things he told me made this obvious.)
Amazon has stated that they’re fixing the problem, and also putting safeguards in place so that it doesn’t happen again. In other words, so that the censorship other nations impose upon their people don’t affect us here.
It’s also worth noting that Amazon has been hit financially by this as well as having to deal with an enormous publicity firestorm–another friend of mine calculated that Jeff Bezos as an individual lost over $80 million dollars today. Personally, I’d consider that to be punishment enough. And if it *was* a corporate decision, they just learned the hard way how very bad a decision it was.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
However, by that “Mein Kampf” – which is not exactly banned in Germany but kept out of circulation via copyright law – should not be ranked either. But even Amazon Germany not only shows several editions of Mein Kampf for sale, they are also ranked, while “Heather has two mommies” is unranked.
And according to Amazon’s own website, the international Amazon editions are Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan and China. Gay content is definitely legal in Canada, UK, Germany and France (though other things might be illegal there, e.g. Nazi content in Germany, depiction of certain extreme sex acts in the UK). I’m not sure about Japan, but considering Yaoi manga I’d doubt that it’s illegal. So that only leaves China. And I’d assume China would be more interested in banning the Dalai Lama’s works than Heather has two mommys.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
[...] now, via Lilith Saintcrow, the Seattle Post Intelligencer blog has a statement from Amazon about how this is a [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 2:35 am
I received this exact non-apology email in my queue this morning in response to my complaint email. I also find the categories to be suspicious along the lines of “adult” as were addressed in the earlier reports of customer service responses.
Notice the letter doesn’t address that bit of data, either.
Thanks for all the great in-depth posts on this topic.
I’m so annoyed by this customer service letter I may start purchasing from Barnes & Noble or Powells for my online purchases anyhow.