Lilith Saintcrow

This just in from Mike Daisey, who commented on my “This Is Not A Glitch” post: a source inside Amazon tells him it wasn’t precisely a “glitch” but a translation error.

From an email exchange Mike forwarded to me between himself and Anthony Hecht, a reporter at The Stranger (I have Mike’s permission to quote):

From: Mike Daisey *email redacted*
Date: April 13, 2009 2:00:34 PM EDT
To: Anthony Hecht anthony @thestranger.com
Subject: Re: In case it gets lost in the comments…

Well, this is the real story: a guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up “adult”, which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like “erotic” and “sexuality”. That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon. The CS rep thought the porn question as a standard porn question about how searches work.

The livejournaler is full of shit.

md

On Apr 13, 2009, at 1:41 PM, Anthony Hecht wrote:

> Ah, very interesting.. I would actually love to know a little more detail if you have it.. would be great to get the real story out there on Slog, especially as this livejournaler’s claim that he “bantown”‘d it for kicks is making the rounds:
> http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html
>
> a.

(from email)

Hmmmm…It sounds plausible. It still doesn’t explain how Amazon had a policy in place for deranking “adult” content all the way back in February, or why Amazon has refused to explain. More as this develops. And thank you, Mike!

ETA: Mike goes on to explain:

> Interesting.. kind of insane that all the international versions share that data, seems like exactly this kind of problem would have come up before..

It’s not the data they share, it’s the editing system–and not all the editing system, but weird, idiosyncractic bits. The Amazon system is mostly hand-built, and often super idiosyncratic, very Millennium Falcon meets Battlestar Galactica. It works, but it can be temperamental, and if you fuck up it takes awhile to correct.

(from email)

ETA: Fixed the thing that made this all wonky on LJ. Sorry about that. AND, Mike Daisey is a former Amazon employee; he just confirmed that to me.

ETA: In the comments, Mike says there may be no relation between deranking going on since February and the current whole-hog fiasco. I think the two are related because of the subject matter chosen each time to derank; and also because it fits the pattern I noted before with the robber-baron scandal.

Additionally, this has been bothering me: why even have sales rankings if they will mean nothing because of deranking bestselling (in their category) books?

Remember the Spore reviews fiasco and the new and old “review rating” systems too? Even if this is an honest mistake–and the evidence, the timing, Amazon’s response, and the targeting of certain subjects does not say “honest mistake” to me–it still fits into the pattern of Amazon taking the system that made them popular and trying to subvert it.

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)

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)

Since PublisherWeekly’s server seems to be seriously borked with all the traffic, I’ll repost here.

AmazonFail continues apace. An Amazon spokesperson FINALLY released a statement to PW:

Amazon Says Glitch to Blame for “New” Adult Policy
By Rachel Deahl & Jim Milliot — Publishers Weekly, 4/12/2009 5:49:00 PM

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy.

For most of the weekend on Twitter, in conversations with the hash tag “#amazonfail,” users were discussing the fact that the e-tailer was removing the sales rankings for books that it deemed featured “adult content.” Many readers, and writers, decried the fact that Amazon appears to be removing the sales ranking for titles that feature gay and lesbian characters and/or themes.

The director of the Erotic Authors Association, who goes by the pen name Erastes, told PW that many of her members “noticed their titles had been stripped of their sales rankings” on Amazon. One, Mark Probst, contacted a customer service representative at Amazon and wrote about the exchange on his blog. Probst wrote that the Amazon rep responded to his inquiry by saying that “‘adult’ material” is being excluded from appearing in “some searches and best seller lists” as a “consideration of our entire customer base.”

Whether a glitch or new policy, titles like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain are among the titles who have lost their ranking. (Publishers Weekly, taken in entirety because their site is seriously swamped right now)

This does not wash for two reasons. One, a customer service rep admitted in writing this was “policy”. Saying it is a “glitch” or “not a new policy” is both disingenuous and outright patronizing.

Second, and more compelling reason: A “glitch” would have taken out other books–like, say, Mein Kampf or the disgusting “how to cure homosexuality” screeds. Instead, what we have is a specific targeted campaign, albeit a clumsy and not-very-well-thought-out one.

Now, if Amazon would have stuck to small-press GLBT and incrementally inched toward getting even Lady Chatterley off their search rankings, consumers might have been led further down the primrose path. As it is, between the admission of policy and the fact of the removal of search rankings to cut down the sales of “certain” titles, what we have here is not a glitch but a poorly-executed bit of fuckery that was in no way UNintentional. The only reason this hit big is because of the degree of fuckeration over a short period of time.

(And before you say anything about my use of the term “fuckeration”, let me just warn you that I am incandescently angry right at the moment, and I do moderate comments here.)

The third (small and circumstantial) reason I don’t believe it is because of the timing. Easter weekend? It just happens on a holiday weekend? No, I’m sorry. I will eat fish and I will eat meat, but there is some shit I will NOT eat, and this is a heapin’ helpin’ of it.

Lost in a lot of the hullabaloo is the disability angle and the fact that feminist and female sexuality books were also deranked. This was intentional. I would go so far as to say it was mistaken and probably a committee decision of surpassing corporate blindness, but do not insult my intelligence and tell me it was a “glitch”. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being a hit job by a hate group, as tehdely theorizes–but still, Amazon has not become a huge company by taking weirdo fundies seriously, even weirdo fundies with agendas.

The only flaw I can see with tehdaly’s theory is that sex toys and other “objectionable to someone (or a right wing nut)” material remained up. This happened with books first to test the waters, and Amazon’s previous behavior with trying to take over the POD industry came off initially in very much the same way.

Anyway. The way I feel about this could be summed up in three words. “Glitch, my ASS.” Amazon has just insulted my intelligence, and yours. Bigtime.

ETA: What Dear Author said.

ETA: Another reason why this isn’t a “glitch”–it was happening in FEBRUARY.

ETA: Carolyn Kellogg of LATimes finally gets Amazon on the horn…and they say nothing when she directly asks them.

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)

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)