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).