Dampening my snickering glee at being ranked among Movements and Periods is the news that Amazon seems to be stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content.”
In short: someone in Amazon has utter shit for brains.
Authors such as Jaci Burton, Maya Banks, Larissa Ione and Stephanie Tyler have reported that since being stripped of their sales rankings, their titles are no longer found in searches on Amazon.com. MetaWriter is also compiling a list of titles that have been stripped of their sales rank.
When pressed for a reason, Amazon.com’s customer service department told YA author Mark Probst:
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.
What, I ask, the fucking fuckhell? Many an Amazon customer is infuriated, and the #amazonfail hashtag on Twitter has pretty much become the only thing worth following. What to do, what to do?
It’s time to hit ‘em where it hurts. No, not a boycott. When you want someone to pay attention, you hit ‘em in the PR.
It’s Google Bomb Time!
We did it for Bill Napoli. Now it’s Amazon’s turn. As always, fuckwittery should not go unrewarded. We propose the following entry be entered into the lexicon:
Amazon Rank
amazon rank
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): amazon ranked1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies).
2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.Etymology: from 12 April 2009 removal of sales rank figures from books on Amazon.com containing sexual, erotic, romantic, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer content, rendering them impossible to find through basic search functions at the top of Amazon.com’s website. Titles stripped of their sales rankings include “Bastard Out of Carolina,” “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” several romance novels, GLBTQ fiction novels, YA books, and narratives about gay people.
Example of usage: “I tried to do a report on Lady Chatterly’s Lover for English Lit, but my teacher amazon ranked me and I got an F on grounds that it was obscene.”
Alternate usage: “My girlfriend wanted to preserve her virginity, and I was happy to respect that, then she amazon ranked and decided anal sex was okay.”
Making this the top result, which is also dependent upon algorithms and shit, requires help from you savvy folks.
I’ve created a page with the definition for “amazon rank.” LINK TO http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank with “Amazon Rank” as the anchor text. The link should look like this:
This is known as Google-bombing.
Second of all: Urbandictionary.com. We’re creating a definition and if it’s approved, you can vote on it to increase its prominence. Vote early, vote often to increase the definition’s power.
All you have to do is link to the page using these words: Amazon Rank. The more you do it, the higher up in rank the page will go, and the more successful it will be. One would hope.
The goal: that “Amazon Rank” points to the definition that underscores Amazon.com’s shortminded censorship and inconsistent policing of what ought to be accessible to the book buying public.
ETA: As of 6:15pm EST/2:25pm SBTB Time, we are number one in google results for Amazon Rank. Holy smoke. Behold the power of angry bookfolk, Twitter, and the interweb.
ETA: As of 7:54pm EST, Amazon has given out a host of explanations, which I’ve heard from Twitterers, along the lines of “people complained” to “we will have more information tomorrow.” I smell a giant meeting in PR at Amazon HQ bright and early tomorrow. We’ll see what the morning brings.
But in my inbox, an email from Craig Seymour whose book, All I Could Bare, a memoir of his job as a stripper, was stripped of sales rank back in February 2009, despite memoirs from prominent pornography actors remaining within the ranks. So this has been creeping up insidiously, it seems, until massive delisting occurred over the last few days. Pokes some mammoth stripper-pole sized holes in the “we responded to customer complaints” response.
Jane from DA has, of course has a template response letter to send, as well as links and a full-bodied explanation of why sales rank is important. Carolyn Kellogg from the LA Times book blog also covered the story today. We’ll see what tomorrow brings in #amazonfail.
ETA 9:13 pm EST: Oh Noes! It was a glitch! One that’s been in operation since February, according to Craig Seymour, and one that clearly should be blamed for a whole mess of other problems.
Also, if you do a search for Brokeback Mountain from the front page, the paperback editions that come up at the top of the search list are either sold through Amazon Marketplace, rather than straight from Amazon, or they’re import editions.
@Carrie Lofty
Thank you. This is ridiculous.
And also, just to reiterate THIS IS NOT A GLITCH. Amazon is trying to say that it was, but I have multiple friends who’ve gotten emails from Amazon saying it’s a new policy on “adult content.”
Screw Amazon. I was going to get a Kindle—what else is good?
@Sierra Dafoe – Yes, I imagine the customer service department demanded something be put out now, to avoid the absolute disaster they’d have on their hands by Monday. If they can get their glitch story out now, it might stop some emails from being fired or calls being made until more is known.
However, I have to say it… seems their “glitch” is awfully queer. *cough*
@Caranfin – I use bestseller lists a lot to keep up with titles I might not have heard about yet in particular categories, and if I’m trying to get ideas about gift books. If books have no rank, they’re automatically not going to appear on those lists.
Very interesting potential explanation from http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
“It’s obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as “adult” after too many people have complained about it. It’s also obvious that there aren’t too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly “objectionable” materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find.”
He makes a very interesting parallel to the “Warriors of Light”/LJ mad panic a couple of years ago… and overall has a plausible potential explanation for what’s going on at Amazon (which, given that the choices seem to be “massive incredible stupid” and “crazy conspiracy,” is not saying much, really…).
JD
So in my own eReader Olympics- Sony just won the bronze, silver AND gold.
Amazon won’t be seeing any money from me.
I don’t buy the ‘glitch’ excuse either. That’s one of the weakest spins I’ve heard in PR land for quite some time now.
I read that, Jane Drew, and it seems to make sense until you really ponder it. Even in the comments for that blog:
http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html?thread=259319#t259319
Also, customer service hasn’t said anything like this, but rather started out talking about a new policy. Now they’re talking about a glitch.
I would like to believe Amazon was the victim here, but I’m not seeing it.
I don’t believe in the theory posed at the link by Jane Drew. The evidence clearly shows that it is not based on customer objection but something more objective (and thereby a bit more objectionable).
In addition to the obvious homophobia, i’m worried about what this means for the future of digital censorship: http://urbzen.com/2009/04/12/making-books-disappear/
@Jane Drew:
If that were to turn out to be the case, then someone should humbly suggest that those angered by this policy (not an insignificant number) go to Amazon’s site and start flagging Christian/Evangelical/Dominionist-leaning material as offensive to see if the results are similar.
Amazon is a lot of things, and they’ve shown before now that the Amazon corporate hive-mind is capable of making wondrously ill-considered judgment calls. But Amazon is not generally guilty of willful stupidity, and it would take a pretty high level of willful stupidity for them to deliberately set out on a censorship campaign of the kind postulated by this weekend’s detractors.
Clearly, there is a policy in place for de-ranking content explicitly understood to be “adult”, per the February incident—but as Marshall notes, that policy is almost certainly there to (attempt to) deal with a very narrow range of material. The February incident suggests that the policy may not have been appropriately applied in the specific case (and/or may be due for revision), but by itself doesn’t establish a pattern of abuse.
The abrupt explosion of de-rankings observed this weekend looks very much like a troll/Bantown event of the sort “tehdely” postulates…with one major caveat. As various observers have noted, it’s relatively difficult for casual Websurfers to directly tweak the Amazon database; in order for the present fiasco to reflect a troll/Bantown attack, the trolls would theoretically need “inside” access to the database.
The conclusion? It seems extremely likely to me that Amazon’s database has been hacked in some way. Personally, I’ve been wondering if tehdely‘s hypothetical trolls have a Conficker virus-programmer in their back pocket, but that’s only one possible avenue of infection, and the rapid, only semi-consistent-looking pattern of de-rankings really does look a heck of a lot like cascading database corruption, just as Marshall suggests above.
As for the “it’s a glitch” spokes-comment—remember that (1) this is a Major Holiday Weekend, (2) the PR person on call for emergencies does not necessarily speak or understand CodeWrangling, and (3) even if she does, it’s not in Amazon’s corporate interests to admit that either (a) they’ve been successfully hacked, and/or (b) that whatever the source of the problem, the Amazon database is really, really hosed right now, and it’s going to take the programmers (who also have to be called in from egg hunts, family brunches, etc.) awhile to fix it. Thus, while the comment as released is clearly a stalling tactic and a woefully inadequate summation of the problem, it’s both possible and likely that the PR person was doing the best she could with limited information at her disposal.
Is this a major problem? Absolutely. But is it malice on Amazon’s part? It’s simply too early to tell. We need more and better information than we have right now.
wow, lucky its a holiday so corporate PR is still on holidays otherwise i think they might be worried.
Is this the first real major brand to be ripped apart by twitter and then assisted by bloggers?
Just posted this to the comics community I’m a part of. (One of the books Amazon de-listed was a popular award winning manga, Antique Bakery.) Hopefully some of that crowd will be joining in. Hell hath no fury like yaoi and slash fangirls scorned.
This is my view on their public burning….
http://thelostagency.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/amazon-burned-at-the-stake/
I’m not sure anyone thinks this is deliberate malice. Maybe some do. ::shrug:: That isn’t the point. No matter what happened, or how it happened, it needs to be both protested and corrected.
Protested to make sure Amazon truly hears the voice of the consumer, even if it was somewhat of a mix up. I’m not buying it was complete happenstance though.
I can buy that they weren’t trying to pick up a lot of the books that got de-ranked, and that they want to make the site more family friendly, and that the algorithms got all messed up. They still harmed writers, they still inconvenienced readers. They still did a stupid thing.
I don’t have children. I have me. And my husband who acts like a child, but still. When I go to Amazon I want to find the book I want and sorta expect that people are working to make the search function more effective instead of making me count to 100 and chant Ollie Ollie Oxen Free while my book hides from me behind all sorts of less relevant items.
It’s an online bookstore. Even if the censorship is a complete accident, it’s the exact opposite of what they’re meant to represent. Free speech/censorship bad/knowledge good—and wanting to sell more product—are all being screwed over here.
And I’m an Amazon fan—spend a sick amount of money with them. Own 2 Kindle 2s—one for me and one for my husband. Just wrote a sappy glowing report on my Kindle love, not 2 days ago. So, it’s not like I’m looking to pick a fight with a company I usually love.
I believe they’re going to fix this, cannot see a scenario where they won’t, but I’m willing to find my ebooks elsewhere and let them pay for my whispernet if I’m mistaken.
Because there is no choice for me.
I refuse to help them make writers feel second class. I refuse to help them make readers feel dirty or like they have to duck down some dark alley. So, even while I believe they will make it okay, it’s not okay yet—and I’m glad people are making that clear.
fire26—sure, if “26” is responsible.
Susie Bright, smart bitch if there ever was one, weights in: http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2009/04/dear-jeff-bezos-lets-be-adults-shall-we.html
Cyberactivism in full force….fascinating to watch! Let’s see how they dig themselves out of this hole. In a similar vein Amber Quill has this warning for all those using Paypal to purchase books. Has anyone experienced the sort of ‘freezing’ of their account? It has me worried.
Ah, man—guys, you’re getting played.
http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
I don’t work for Amazon, but I build taxonomies for matching algorithms. There are a million ways for an algorithm to go wrong and throw a glitch like the one we’re seeing now. It can be as simple as a single tag getting reclassified, or a node jumping, or just plain incompetence. It happens all the time. Ironically, having a mandate to create a “separate and not quite as equal” zone for LGBT and feminist works would require a LOT of adherence and an enormous amount of effort. Everyone in the tech crew would have to be in on it, at least.
I think this is a simple case of Amazon’s user-generated complaints system getting exploited by a crew of trolls. All the hallmarks are there, including the fired-up and reactionary marginalized community, the major internet entity, and the holiday weekend. Ask yourself this: when has Amazon ever shown an anti-LGBT bias? What would they possibly have to gain from this incredibly unsubtle manipulation?
Just—take a deep breath and actually think about all the potential players and the stakes. Deliberate action by Amazon to marginalize women and gays is pretty far down on my list of possible realities, and I’m pretty sure there’s a bunch of kids in hoodies cracking up about all the outraged “I’m canceling my account!” messages.
Forgot to add: there is no conflict between the “adult” policy and a glitch. I have no idea why people keep waving around a pretty generic brushoff email as “policy, in writing!” Of course they’re going to have certain rules in place to inflate or deflate search results artificially, that’s how matching becomes effective. But if they’re finding content in that “adult” filter section that’s not meant to be there, then there’s a glitch.
It’s not that sinister, people. It needs to be fixed, and should have been looked into way back in February, but a lot of this is just coming off as silly.
To all those who claim this was an outside troll attack exploiting a reporting system, would you please point me to that system?
There are two different feedback options on books that I’ve found.
For paperbacks there’s a generic comment form, where you have to enter text, but no automated ‘report as porn’ option.
ONLY for Kindle editions is there a feedback option to report ‘inappropriate content’ aka porn directly, which does not explain why many Kindle editions still have their ranking whereas the paper versions of the same titles have had their rankings removed.
Please provide proof how this supposed concerted outside attack has happened, because it’s unclear to me how it could have with the facts as I found them on the site.
Grace, you may want to have a peek at the metadata of the books whose rankings have been removed as opposed to those that haven’t. It’s kind of ‘funny’ how only books with tags of ‘erotic’, ‘sex’ and ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘transgender’ seem to be affected. That’s a peculiar selection of tags to have been accidentally reclassified.
But even if this was outside attack rather than inside policy, it casts a very poor light on Amazon’s IT department and their abilities to protect their system. Especially since they were aware of how their ‘report’ button on reviews has been abused after the not so distant harassment/manipulation scandal.
With regard to the people who are saying this is just an elaborate troll, let me flat-out disagree. There have been too many books, across too many disciplines, fiction and non-fiction, for this to have been some sort of glitch or troll. This is something that scooped up erotica and disabled sexuality…Radclyffe Hall and Michel Foucault. No, there’s something more going on here.
I investigate failures such as these in my work life. For example, code gets implemented and it has unusual results, such as some transactions not processing the way we would expect. Further investigation will find the issue: a pre-existing problem exposed by the installation of the new code, or, perhaps, a parameter that was set incorrectly.
However, to get to that point, in a reputable and not rogue organization, there is a procedure. A request is made to have a function or a feature implemented. Resources are allocated; a programmer (or more) is assigned to write code. That code is put into a test environment and run through its paces. Issues that come up in test are corrected and the code is run through more testing. Then a plan for implementation is put forward, the impacted groups review and sign off on it, a time is chosen to roll out the code when it will have the least impact upon end users and customers. The code is rolled out, end users test the code and hopefully everything goes as planned. That’s what a reputable organization does…and, I can tell you, if it doesn’t happen that way, the sh*train will fall.
Now, maybe Amazon’s coding people pushed through a change that management didn’t know about. I have no idea. Maybe this was couched as a “feature” to improve the family-friendly nature of the Amazon website (trying to think of ways to smuggle something like this in). Maybe the proponents of this code misrepresented what it was supposed to do to the management who signed off on the change
But one thing is clear—you don’t make this big of a change, impacting across thousands of books that sell thousands of copies a day, and it be a “troll.” This is most definitely not a troll. This was a deliberate action, but I’m thinking that the people who did it didn’t have a clue as to what kind of cr*p would rain down on their heads. They thought they could sneak it in and it wouldn’t be noticed.
And, if Amazon is such an incompetent organization that just Any Ole Code can get into its system, I would worry about buying books from them. In fact, Amazon should give us a Root Cause Analysis of what went wrong here, to reassure us, the readers who buy from Amazon and the authors who sell on Amazon, that this kind of a screwup won’t happen again.
I order hardly anything from Amazon any more – why would I, when I can get pretty much everything bookish from http://www.bookdepository.co.uk with free shipping worldwide?
Parcels usually arrive within a week (much faster than Amazon), and did I mention free shipping? – which if you’re not in a country where you can get free shipping from Amazon, is a big deal – even if a book isn’t discounted, it’s rare that Amazon is cheaper (and most things are cheaper than if I buy locally, too, sad to say).
Somewhere in the Amazonian behemoth is some sort of hip pocket, so maybe others will be interested in this alternative. I have no shares; just a customer.
Glitch, stupid decision, or some idiot not paying attention… any way you look at it, Amazon stepped in this pile of *ick!* big time.
Personally, I think google-bombing is a great idea, and blogged about your idea on Romance Lives Forever
Thanks for the entertaining read as well as teaching me a new trick while giving Amazon a kick in the pants. Wow! A three-for-one special! Go bitches!
Posted the definition to two of the highest trafficked sites I read (Gawker and Plastic), and wrote an email to Amazon on their Customer Service link. Also put everything from my cart into “save” to see if they fix it. If not, the account is getting canceled.
Thanks for stepping up again, SMTB!
which84 emails will finally get Amazon to apologize?
Quit yer bitchin’ over the fascist policies of Amazon and go support the *real* Amazon bookstore!
<http://www.amazonfembks.com/>
Scroll to the bottom of the page to see how the fake Amazon went after the little people, and google for the rest. IF we give our money (our power) to those like the fake Amazon who refuse to support us, we deserve the lack of support they return to us. Keep your money, your power, in our communities. It will make us stronger.
The REAL Amazon Bookstore
http://www.amazonfembks.com
Amazon.com is saying “As an added service for customers, authors, publishers, artists, labels, and studios, we show how items in our catalog are selling. The lower the number, the higher the sales for that particular item. The calculation is based on Amazon.com sales and is updated each hour to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold on Amazon.com. “
Amazon.co.uk is saying “The calculation is based entirely on Amazon.co.uk sales and is updated regularly.” and “Our Sales Rank figures are intended to be of general interest.”
The UK Government says at http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/yourrights/rightsindifferentsettings/shopsandservices/pages/shopsservicesclubsandassociations.aspx
that
“Businesses and organisations, when providing services to people, cannot discriminate unlawfully on the grounds of their disability, race, gender, religion or belief or sexual orientation. This applies whether services are provided face-to-face, by telephone or online, and whether the services must be paid for or are provided free of charge.”
Amazon, provided that there is a demonstrable bias in their rankings against GLTB books which is not based on sales, is providing misleading information on how their sales ranks are compiled, and that, if there is discrimination against GLTB interests in providing the service of publishing those ranks, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk may well be acting unlawfully in UK law.
I’d be interested to hear what the legal position is in other jurisdictions. Sorry for the length of this post.
@Faellie:
You never have to apologize for the length of a comment. We love wordy. Hell, we ARE wordy. Have you SEEN Candy’s word count? Holy shit.
I have to say, many of Amazon’s more monolithic business decisions have rankled, but Amazon is a private corporation with one obligation: to secure a return on investment for their shareholders.
I can’t see how this decision creates any value for shareholders, or translates to profit. If anything, it’s a massive loss of good will, and quite an impairment.
Don’t forget to vote on the Urban Dictionary definition of Amazon rank:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=amazon+rank
Not to be pedantic, but it’s a public company not a private one, and as such can be influenced by those shareholders they are earning money for. Annual meeting, anyone?
Bravo to Michelle R’s post of 12 April—especially her last paragraph!
FWIW, Patrick Hayden’s guess is more or less what mine was—-someone complained, a fix was attempted and then the whole thing got totally out of hand.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011173.html
I include the link mainly because I think his final point is true and well worth keeping in mind.
Thank you, Mary.
Ick, just went ahead and canceled all my pre-orders. Several seasons of TV shows. A computer game. A handful of books that just did not seem Kindle friendly. A couple pre-orders for Kindle. My Kindle subscriptions for the NYT, Newsweek, Times… The Kindle stuff didn’t ask for a reason for cancel, but the TV and print stuff did, and I told them exactly why and when the orders would be reinstated.
When I went to my email to see if Amazon responded to my complaint email, I found that they hadn’t. But the cemetery sent me a final mock-up on my mother’s headstone. Great way to start the day.
> I think this is a simple case of Amazon’s user-generated complaints
> system getting exploited by a crew of trolls.
This seems wildly optimistic.
For one thing, there is no simple ‘complaint system’. Books *can* be tagged as ‘adult’, but a lot of the ones which have been deranked weren’t. All three of my books have gone, and the only tags they have in common are ‘dystopia’ and ‘gay science fiction’. And if Amazon are automatically classifying all ‘gay science fiction’ as adult, then that’s EXACTLY the behaviour that people are complaining about. ‘Gay’ == ‘adult’.
I’m sure they are automatically banning by keyword, but the results fit far more closely the suggestions that they’re banning by publisher keywords. This isn’t trolling by an outside group, this is fail entirely internal to Amazon.
@SBSarah
> but Amazon is a private corporation with one obligation: to
> secure a return on investment for their shareholders.
And to follow the law. I cannot possibly see how this isn’t illegal discrimination under UK law, and amazon.co.uk is doing exactly the same thing as amazon.com.
I’ve blogged about it here and here. I also took down my Amazon Associates link on my sidebar, though I still have the header up, and replaced it with an Amazon Rank link. 🙂
Some smug fuckstick is taking credit for gaming the system:
http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html
How true this may be is a matter of conjecture.
I especially like the comments to that post, Brandi, wherein Smart Bitches and Jezebel are listed as the responses of the “libtards.”
It’s not really that early, but I’m not a huge fan of starting off my week with lack of faith in humanity.
(FWIW, I am extremely skeptical of that person’s claims. Taking credit for this will gain him instantaneous internet fame, but the whole ‘motive’ is just positively inane. [hm. slant rhyme.] I don’t understand computer coding at all, so I’ve no idea if what he said he did could do this.)
I’ve got CNN online ‘on’ in the background while I work and they just mentioned this story as coming up. Asking views to share their opinons, etc.
Also listed on CNN’s main page (http://www.cnn.com) under the Tech header!
Okay…that should have been “viewers” now “views.” Sigh. Must be Monday…
True story: I have been reading since I was three. Going downtown for doctor’s appointments, we would pass a building clearly marked “ADULT BOOKS.” I was always frustrated when my parents laughed at me for wanting to stop there and see the “adult books”; I thought that an adult bookstore must be where they kept the really good books, while they stuck us kids with the boring picture books.
Nowadays, I think I was right. There’s no such thing as an adult book. There are just books. We are the adults; we should be able to make these decisions for ourselves.
More insightful insight here:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011173.html
This one injects a healthy dose of “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” (aka Hanlon’s Razor) into the discussion.