If you click the image, it will take you to the search results page this image came from.

This search result (March 16, 2010) tells me two things:

1. There is a new Dexter book coming out in September. (I’ll give Jeff Lindsay a chance to redeem himself but the ice he is skating on is thin.)
2. Someone is selling book reviews on Amazon for $10 each. (And no, it’s not me)

Now, the incomprehensible item is the second one. This person has 59 book reviews for sale via digital download on Amazon. As much as I would love to get paid for reviewing books, I’m not seeing a viable business model in this particular approach. Consumers don’t buy book reviews, publishers do (by publishers I mean magazines, newspapers, web sites, blogs, etc. rather than book publishers).

Since Amazon doesn’t provide a mechanism for selling the rights to republish content like Constant Content does, the goal here must be to sell to consumers. The problem is that consumers don’t pay for book reviews. Particularly consumers who are browsing an online bookseller that displays free reviews right on the same page as the book. Especially for books that are on the bestseller list and get plenty of reviews on their own.

Am I missing the brilliant business plan here or is selling book reviews to book buyers on Amazon as pointless as it appears? The one customer review on these book reviews (and no, it’s not me) sums up my thoughts when I stumbled across these reviews for sale:

What the hell are you people smoking, and can I have some?

At $10 per review, I should be charging you $10-$40 dollars/month to view this blog. When you’ve finished laughing at that notion, feel free to leave a comment.

In case you’re blissfully unaware, MacMillan placed an ad in Publishers Weekly explaining that they were changing the prices of their ebooks, which Amazon was none too happy with.

Amazon responded by informing MacMillan that they would no longer sell any MacMillan books–digital or otherwise. Basically, Jeff Bezos took his ball and went home. On Sunday afternoon, Amazon quietly announced in its Kindle forum that maybe it would sell MacMillan books after all. Apparently, Bezos realized the game would go on — with or without him.

I wasn’t going to blog about this is because — and this will come as a shock to you — I don’t care. I don’t care because I don’t buy ebooks from middlemen.

Every ebook I’ve bought has been bought from the publisher’s or author’s website because I don’t see why you need a middleman for an eBook. There’s no shipping or inventory advantage to a middleman like there is with physical objects. It amazes me that established publishers like MacMillan don’t learn from successful epubs who sell exclusively through their web sites. Heck, Simon & Schuster sold ebooks direct to consumers ten years ago.

I think Bezos is afraid that consumers and publishers will wake up and realise that his company and other booksellers can easily be bypassed. In fact, I would bet money that the motivation behind the Kindle is to lock consumers into a particular vendor to preserve the middleman.

Otherwise, Amazon could one day be obsolete and Bezos knows it.

#1: The best Kijiji ad ever. Kijiji is somewhat like Craigslist if you’re unfamiliar with it. Hey, if you’re going to ask for something for free, you might as well make it interesting (seriously, go read it).

#2: You may have heard that news that John Hughes died last week. He was the director of a number of movies, like The Breakfast Club, that defined the ’80s for many people in North America. In the wake of his death, there was a very interesting/touching post on a blog by a woman who was pen pals with John Hughes when she was a teenager.

#3: You know you’re unpopular when hackers trying to knock you off the web take out LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter to do it. Something tells me this guy is going to be unpopular with users of those sites for a while. In other news: Georgia and Russia are still not playing nice with each other.

#4: A humorous look at the ups and downs of writing (er, dating) a book from initial idea (first date) to publication (break up) by Libba Bray. Dang, I wish I was this clever.

#5: If you’ve been using Tr.im as your URL shortener, you’re out of luck. The service is shutting down. No word on what happens to all those shortened links people have made.

#6: It was bound to happen: Recent Amazon patent filings suggest ads are coming to Kindle ebooks.

#7: Do you know what it takes to be blocked by William Shatner on Twitter? Hilarious blog post by blockee.

#1: I can’t imagine who thought this was a good idea, but a publisher convinced Amazon to delete Orwell ebooks that had already been bought on customer Kindles. That’s sure to encourage consumers to buy ebooks…or maybe not.

#2: It’s all very good to have a blurb by a famous author on a less famous author’s book, but designing the cover to fool the consumer into thinking the book was actually written by said famous author? Not cool. Not cool at all.

#3: Remember that speech Sarah Palin gave when she resigned her post as governor of Alaska? Someone has edited, copy edited, and fact checked that train wreck into understandable English. I was tempted to do this myself, but Vanity Fair beat me to it.

#4: I’ve long suspected that Facebook is a privacy nightmare, but I didn’t know that it actually violates the law (at least where I live). Maybe I’ll finally be able to delete my account from my 5 minute foray into Facebookdom (creepy).

#5: Another post on judging a book by its cover. This one from Justine Larbalestier on the US cover of her book Liar where the cover shows a white girl but the lead character is actually black. Confusing to the readers to say the least especially since the book is about a girl that lies and the cover suggests she is lying about at least one thing she isn’t lying about.

#1: An update on J.D. Salinger’s bid to block publication of a book based on The Catcher in the Rye. A temporary restraining issue was issued, but the judge reserved judgment on the fair use issues raised.

#2: J. A. Konrath, author of Whiskey Sour and other novels, weighs in on the price of ebooks: “The rules of supply and demand don’t work in a digital world, because the supply is unlimited. You don’t fight piracy with weapons. You fight piracy with cost and convenience.” Exactly!

#3: One of the advantages of the Kindle is supposed to be that your library of books you’ve bought is always there for you to download so you don’t have to keep copies of every single book on your Kindle. Well, apparently the downloads aren’t unlimited. If you download a book too many times Amazon won’t allow the download and you’ll have to pay for the book again. Be sure to read the next article in the saga (linked at the bottom of the first article). It seems even Amazon doesn’t know what’s going on. More on Kindle DRM issues.

#4: A very good assessment on How the eBook Industry Isn’t Like the Music Industry.

#1: An argument for why ebooks cost as much as they do and not as little as consumers think they should from CNET. Interesting, but I think some of the costs are being counted twice. Marketing an ebook doesn’t require a separate book tour from the print version of the book (and most books by large publishers come out in print as well). There is also the common argument made that cheap ebook prices will cannibalize the print sales of the book, which I think is wrong. I don’t think there is as much overlap between those two markets as publishers keep assuming (if there is data to back up the assertion that ebooks cannibalize print sales I’d be interested in seeing it).

#2: More on ebooks: A blog post by author Lynn Viehl on my favourite multi-author blog about whether or not to give away free ebooks or, as she puts it, “To E- or not to E-” It’s an interesting read, especially for authors, on how to use free ebooks to attract readership for your print books.

#3: Not directly about publishing, but there is an interesting article on Advertising Age about whether companies should pay bloggers for product reviews. I thought it might be of interest because every once in a while a new book blogger will raise the question of charging for book reviews (there are sites that do this and post them on amazon.com). For the record, I don’t charge for reviews and if I ever did I would disclose it (though my opinion would be the same because I wasn’t there the day they taught ass-kissing as anyone who’s met me is well aware–it’s somewhat of a character defect of mine). I do receive free review copies (not always) as do many book bloggers who are reviewing current releases.

#4: Amazon is making friends and influencing people again (not). Now it is censoring the author blogs and making the content harder to find. Seems some authors were using the author blog feature to sell directly to consumers and cutting Amazon out of the deal.

#5: Google is getting into the ebook business as a direct competitor to Amazon (and others) by launching an ebook store. Not everyone is happy about this: PC World think this will create a standards war with consumers stuck in the middle. Fiction Matters points out that this will be an online ebook store only which has little appeal to readers who want their books portable and unplugged from the Internet.

#6: Ever wonder how authors of classics feel about derivative works (think the glut of derivatives of Jane Austen)? Well, someone wrote a derivative work of Catcher in the Rye. Unlike many authors whose works are being used, Salinger is still alive and he is not thrilled.

#7: This one is not really a publishing item, but I thought it was interesting: Newsweek has published an article about Oprah where they dissect the credibility of her experts and the balance of her coverage on topics. I am an anti-Oprah book club kind of reader (if she recommends it I know I won’t like it). Although I have found some of her experts credible, I agree with the articles premise that the focus is often more on personality than credibility and a balanced presentation on topics is often lacking. She is powerful though (Random disclosure: She boosted one of my relatives’ businesses considerably just by mentioning one of his products in an O Magazine ‘favourite things’ list).

#1: Currently there is a lot of discussion about Amazon’s move to become a publisher by picking up self-published books sold on Amazon that it thinks it could sell more of by issuing hard cover editions and doing marketing.

#2: A Russian book reviewer was sued over their review by a writer: Neither one is happy with the outcome.

#3: Not publishing specific, but related to story telling and pop culture: An analysis of the new Star Trek movie with a perspective you’ll read nowhere else (hilarious I thought, but then I’m a little twisted I’ve been told ).

That’s all for this week’s links.

When last we left the online bookseller, 58 000 books related to GLBT, erotica, feminism, and sexuality had their sales ranks removed which in turn removed them from amazon bestseller lists and front page searches. This stirred up a “Twittershitstorm” as it is known in web parlance which was tagged #amazonfail (click on the link to see the latest in the conversation).

Being a long weekend, there was no official company response until Monday and even then it was minimal with several online news outlets reporting that amazon had told them it was a “glitch.” Some people who had contacted amazon by email received an apology email with a similar message. (Much to my amusement, this poor PR response immediately sparked the tag #glitchmyass on Twitter). Amazon has a habit of blaming everything on glitches and then when the fuller explanation comes much later it usually turns out that their definition of “glitch” is loose, to say the least.

In my earlier post, I linked to a blog that hypothesized this was some kind of hacker attack. This was the likeliest explanation I had seen by that point (far more likely than “glitch”) because there is an undeniably human element to the books that were delisted. A computer glitch is, by my definition, a programming issue or hardware failure. If this was a glitch then the delisted books should not have fallen along political/religious lines in topics that are not specifically political or religious. That’s a complicated way of saying that a computer glitch would have hit books on homosexuality equally, thereby clearing the category in searches rather than selectively delisting all but anti-gay books which seems to be what happened (e.g. on Sunday the search result for homosexuality on amazon’s site returned a book on curing homosexuality as the top result).

Predictably enough, soon a hacker claiming responsibility for the delisting of books on amazon appeared. Also predictable? The prompt appearance of the twitter tag #hackermyass. A few people have poked through the code that the hacker posted and called bullshit. I’m not geek enough to know either way. What I do know is that the motivation the supposed hacker claims for the attack doesn’t match up with the books that were delisted. I’m not suggesting that everyone is logical or rational, but there is a disconnect between “gay people kept flaggging my I-wanna-chick-to-do-heroin-with ads on Craigslist” and the list of books that were delisted.

In response to a hacker claiming responsibility for the delisting of books, anonymous coders at amazon have come out and said the problem is internal though a human-mediated internal problem as opposed to the glitch claimed by amazon. It seems that amazon is claiming that an amazon.fr employee “mistakenly” labelled 58 000 books as adult and it propagated around the global amazon system. Predictably, this spawned (can you guess? Oh, come on, sure you can …) the twitter tag #francemyass.

Now, I’m willing to buy the internal employee explanation considering what happens every time a negative review of Dianetics is submitted and how product reviews submitted by authors “brazen” enough to mention that they’ve also written a book are treated. What I don’t buy is that this was an accidental tick of the wrong box on a form. These books don’t appear to have anything in common other than they all offend a particular ideology.

I find it incredibly unlikely that an employee would be legitimately working on this particular collection of books in the course of their work duties. Also, I don’t buy that this is a language problem. I speak, write, and read French. The word for “adult” in French is the very distantly related *cough* “adulte.” Yeah, I can see how that might be confusing.

Of course, there’s no explanation as to why a French employee would be asked to classify English books at all (other than part of the stereotype of Americans is that they hate the French so it may not be far off the mark to suggest that amazon is trying to deflect blame to the French although that sounds absolutely ridiculous — then again it’s part of the French stereotype that they hate Americans so … maybe). The list of books delisted suggests a far better knowledge of English books and American religious/sexual politics than one would expect from someone outside the country. I think there is still a missing piece to this puzzle. [Note: There reports as to whether this was a French employee of amazon.fr or an American employe editing amazon.fr are unclear.]

So, will the truth please stand up? Obviously amazon.com is going to make us work for this rather than just going with the truth. So what do we know at this point?

• amazon.com has a method for flagging adult content to remove it from front page searches and sales rank. We know this because early responses from customer service at amazon consistently gave this response, months apart, to two authors inquiring about disappearing books (links and text of response in previous post if you missed them). The responses seem to have been identical, suggesting they are canned which in turn suggests that this type of removal is some kind of “feature” rather than a “bug.”
• Books that were delisted spanned a large number of categories, which Amazon disingenuously used to suggest that this was not targeted at sexuality in general and GLBT in particular. However, this ignores that the books in health, memoir, parenting, etc. fell within common themes rather than random ones.
• Related to the above point, there is a logic to the books that were delisted and the ones that weren’t within the same categories but that logic is a distinctly human ideological one rather than an impartial machine one that you would expect with a computer “glitch.”
• Amazon will not give customers a (pardon the pun) straight answer. They aren’t known for giving such answers and don’t appear to be starting now. Given the possible scenarios that have been presented (glitch, hacker, internal meddling) it’s likely that their PR believes that more damage will be sustained by giving a satisfactory answer.

And that’s more than you’ll ever want to know about my thoughts on this little PR tempest. I’ll leave you with this little bit of humour from the excellent “The Other Coast” which was particularly appropriate yesterday:

It appears that amazon.com has once again attempted an ill-fated manipulation of its site. This is not the first time, of course. Amazon is notorious for caving to pressure from authors and other groups on negative reviews and removing them instead of letting customers make their own decisions. In that same vein, amazon is now removing certain types of books from their front page search results and bestseller lists.

I have tried confirming this with mixed results by searching for titles, but I’m inclined to believe it to be true since amazon.com has a track record with this sort of thing and a number of people on Twitter are reporting problems finding these books. Also, there are a number of authors confirming that their books have disappeared.

Although this issue has been around since February, it has come up again in the last few days because of a post by another author who wondered why two newly released and high profile books in his genre had their sales rankings disappear (if you know any authors, you’ll know that checking their sales ranking on amazon is like you Googling yourself — an obsession in many cases). The next day he noticed that hundreds of books in the same genre and related topics had disappeared. Surely it was a glitch? A programming error? An update to the site gone wrong?

Not being the alarmist type, the author asked amazon for an explanation and this was the response, clearly killing the theory that this is anything other than deliberate:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Service
Amazon.com Advantage

There is even a screencapture of the conversation on the original blog post (nice touch).

Now you may have noticed that the genre in question is adult (according to amazon). Maybe you don’t read adult material. Maybe you feel that adult material should not appear in search listings. Read on before you shrug your shoulders.

According to reports on Twitter, amazon’s definition of “adult” is amorphous. So far it includes:

• Anything to do with accepting or promoting homosexuality (yet not books that deny or advocate against homosexuality)
• Some erotica, but apparently not Playboy.
• Harlequin’s Spice line.
• Ellora’s Cave books.
• Books about non-heterosexual love whether or not they contain anything sexually explicit.
• Books about gay and lesbian parenting, including books on preventing suicide in homosexual teens.
• Classics such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
• Non-fiction non-explicit accounts of gay/lesbian experience (contemporary and historical).

The above books have reportedly been removed from the front page search results as well as bestseller lists on amazon.com. Now maybe none of these books, which are still for sale if you can manage to find them, are ones that you are particularly interested in or even agree with. I, myself, probably wouldn’t have noticed that these books had been rendered more obscure by amazon’s actions if someone hadn’t told me. It still mattters to me. And I hope it matters to you.

This whole hiding-of-books-based-on-sexual-content thing has the stench of religious fundamentalism. Every argument I have ever come across against homosexuality eventually comes back to religion so I find it inconceivable that religion is not mixed up in this in some way. While I can understand not wanting to read about certain topics based on your beliefs, I cannot understand or condone making it more difficult for others to read that material.

After all, there are other topics that I read about that are equally offensive to some that have nothing to do with sex like *gasp* atheism. I generally won’t touch a book on religion (fiction or non-fiction) with a ten foot pole, but it’s of no consequence to me if someone else wants to read on that topic and I would never take it upon myself to impose my book tastes on someone else by engineering what you find on a bookseller’s site.

There is surely some topic that you are interested that is offensive to someone else (there is always someone who is offended by something). Ask yourself how you would feel if those books were made difficult — or for the novice user, effectively impossible — to find. Now ask yourself what you would do about it.

Links for your reading pleasure (may be updated as I collect more):

The new definition of Amazon Rank

The petition: In protest of Amazon’s new adult policy

FYI: For those wondering why I have included amazon affiliate links, it is because I know amazon tracks these links and I’m hoping if enough affiliates do this that amazon.com will see that it is NOT just amazon “bashers” who are incensed by this so-called “policy.” (I hardly expect anyone to buy following a link from this post )

UPDATE: Interestingly, amazon is trying to claim this as a glitch, which they’ve also tried to claim when negative reviews are removed from their site and also tried to claim when they removed all reviews by any author who mentioned that they were also an author anywhere in their review. This seems to be the default at amazon’s public relations department.

While I don’t buy “glitch”, there is a post that hypothesizes that the amazon site is being “gamed” by a concerted attack to remove certain types of books. It makes for interesting reading and is one of the only explanations I’ve seen that makes sense (but, if true, does not excuse amazon calling it a glitch rather than admitting they’ve been gamed).