steepholm | The Glitch that Stole Christmas

Amazon has put its hands up. The official statement reads:

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.

Sounds plausible to me, as far as it goes. At least it confirms that the mess stemmed from inside Amazon (sorry, trolls and troll groupies).

It's more notable for what it doesn't say, though. I must have missed the apology for the distress this caused, to say nothing of the missed sales for the authors affected. If even Gordon Brown can learn to say sorry, surely it's not beyond Jeff Bezos? No mention of how long this has been going on, either - days, months? And a little more detail on how this error/accident came about wouldn't hurt. Was it an over-zealous human deciding that books on disabled sexuality were likely to be offensive (as well of course as anything GLBT related), and using the publishers' metadata to remove their rankings? That's still what it looks like from here.

As for "many books have now been fixed" - at the time of writing, the top title on an Amazon search on Homosexuality is still The Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Amazon won't be getting my business back any time soon, if ever.

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Well, but the second entry in that search is confusing - have you clicked on it? It has 'fiction' and 'nonfiction', and the first fiction book is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and on down follows a list of a lot of well-known YA books - I haven't read most of them, except Wallflower, but David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy is there,
so I can't imagine the unknown ones are homophobic!

And number three is What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality, which despite concluding that "the Bible supplies no real basis for the condemnation of homosexuality" has been given its top tag as Amazonfail. That seems counterproductive, to say the least.

You'd really want to know exactly how this list looked before AmazonFail to decide to boycott them forever on the speed of its repair, wouldn't you?

You'd really want to know exactly how this list looked before AmazonFail to decide to boycott them forever on the speed of its repair, wouldn't you?

Indeed - and it's not a search I ever did before this all blew up, I admit. But what I'd really want is a) an apology to those affected, and b) an explanation of how this came about: what happened was clearly not what they wanted to happen, but what were they trying to do?

The really wonderful thing is if you search for "LGBT books" on amazon, you get, among more relevant matter, The Ultimate Book of Lighthouses by Samuel Willard Compton and Michael J. Rhein - and I swear it is just what it says on the tin! Good book, but bog all to do with LGBT - I wonder if it lost its ranking?

But what I'd really want is a) an apology to those affected, and b) an explanation of how this came about: what happened was clearly not what they wanted to happen, but what were they trying to do?

Your natural Aquarian curiosity in action? ::whistles nonchalantly while making rapid departure::

Seriously, I don't ever expect to know - or that much care - what they were trying to do, and will be satisfied with a quick rectifying of the mess and their assurance that they're trying to make it less likely to happen in the future. It may be hopelessly naive, but I'd tend to think that those who have had significant loss of sales in the time period will be few, and that'll be compensated for in many cases by the outrage when it comes to light. I also tend to feel there are other, long-standing business practices with many big companies which don't get the truly impressive protest this one got, which we all tend to become aware of and then conveniently forget (and I'm very much including myself in this group!), for a variety of reasons. Boycotting this one forever because of one stupid, stupid offensive mess - I don't know... Making an effort to buy from indie bookshops instead of ordering from Amazon has always been a good thing to do - but an inconvenient one often, and a more expensive one, nearly always, and sometimes there seem to be too many things to worry about to remember as one should. I really don't know!

In perfect dramatic irony timing, I just received a message that War Dog is being posted to you today! What about Marketplace sellers? Should they be punished for this screw-up too? More questions to which I don't know the answer...

I think what they were trying to do does matter, because this is something that was (by their own account) the result of a "ham-fisted" attempt to implement a policy. Given the effect of the ham-fisted version, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what the policy was, or what a less inept implementation of it is likely to entail. (This is quite apart from finding out about errors that led to the ham-fistedness, which I agree we may never know.)

Whether the affected writers will make back their losses isn't really relevant to the question of whether they (or Amazon's customers) deserve an apology from the people who caused them.

I've felt a bit queasy for a while about using this monopolistic and bullying operator for my book buying and selling, and to be honest this has just pushed me into a resolve that I might have come to anyway. On the other hand, their statement doesn't make me feel that they're trying very hard to woo me back. Maybe they'll turn over a leaf in the future? We'll have to wait and see.

Yay for War Dog, meanwhile! In parallel news, YD's present may take a few more days to arrive, as I've had to order it from a company that doesn't ship abroad. But then it's going to be late anyway...

I suggested in

earis's journal yesterday that books that support GLBT rights don't usually use forms of "homosexual" in their titles. They use "gay" or "lesbian" or "bisexual" or "transgender" or "queer" or "GLBT" (with initials in some order). It's possible that the results you're getting are the same results you would have gotten before the tampering.

Then again, I just tried testing this claim by searching for "homosexuality" at Powells Books and comparing that search with the same one at Amazon. The results at Powells are significantly more positive than those at Amazon.

It's more notable for what it doesn't say, though.

Yeah. An actual sorry would not have killed anyone.

The Glitch that Stole Christmas

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