amazon’s rank.
Oh Amazon, you spectacular fuck up.
For those who haven’t heard yet, Amazon just removed a large number of books from its sales rankings and its search listings. Best sellers are being removed from best-seller lists. It isn’t entirely clear why these books are being removed, but it looks as though they’re selectively targeting gay and lesbian fiction and nonfiction, as well as books with “adult” content. What constitutes adult content? Apparently classics, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as non-”adult” texts like Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. Yet Surrender the Booty 3: The Search for More Arse has been left untouched. Maybe they’re just weeding out the good stuff to keep the bar nice and low.
For more, see the twitter buzz: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=amazonfail
A post on the subject by Heather Corinna.
A list of some of the de-ranked books.
And the freshly coined term: Amazon Rank
Update:
Here’s a post with a good summary of the situation and its implications.
Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times wonders why American Psycho is fine, while Unfriendly Fire, a study of military policy, is not. (via sexerati)
Ellen DeGeneres’ biography is apparently “adult” content, and Amazon’s release said the whole thing was a “glitch” despite specifically responding to inquiries form author-customers with their new “Adult” filter policies….
Here’s my blog on the topic, including Amazon’s repsonse to a customer, list of deranked (and somestill ranked but definitely “adult”) titles, etc.
http://gtpeachleigh.blogspot.com/2009/04/speedy-sunday.html
Site appears to have been hacked, a known troll is claiming it, and told how he did it. It would appear to be a legit flag to Amazon because it abused the Flagging system, but since the flagging system has been taken offline the troll is claiming it.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5210424/hacker-claims-he-shoved-amazon-into-the-closet-using-inappropriate-flag-exploit
I’d love to believe that. Melissa Gira spoke to a coder at Amazon who said that 58,000 titles have been flagged as “adult” internally, so it’s hard to say. Maybe it’s a little of both, but I’m inclined to believe Amazon’s taking steps toward restricting its product availability.
http://melissagira.com/sexerati/2009/04/13/amazon-coder-someone-internally-tagged-thousands-of-titles-adult/
I am glad i saw this. I was totally unaware! I work in the adult entertainment biz and she this type of stuff all the time … sadly i have one more thing to boycott now =-/
Assuming for the moment that corporate greed is the sole motivation for Amazon’s actions, it would be counter-productive to eliminate gay/lesbian/alternative adult titles as a general policy considering that roughly 30% (or so) of the population is of that persuasion and a viable market segment for Amazon’s sales.
I just don’t see Amazon imploding that much of it’s potential income in the middle of a world recession (did I say depression?). On the other hand, I have yet to see an “adult” search criteria by which potentially offending titles could be tagged and retrieved by interested buyers over some arbitrary minimum age limit (say, eighteen?).
In which case, it’s not a far reach to postulate that a group of homophobic zealots have managed to infiltrate the middle layers of Amazon corporate where the administration of such foul censorship can and would occur.