Amazon Removed Gay Books from Rankings

[lilac_jive]

An article about this got greenlit on fark today, and the commenters aren't happy:
http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=4324569

[JSWolf]

Amazon is doing something very well. Pissing off customers.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

It is fairly homoerotic isn't it?

It never struck me that way, I have to confess.

[maynard]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Meh.

It's a business.
Businesses make marketing decisions trying to determine what will work best with their targeted customer base.

Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they get it wrong.

Very often the best thing to do is to split different product lines off into separate divisions.

That's absolutely right. If I weren't convinced enough before, I'm thoroughly convinced now that Amazon - the business - does not deserve my money any longer. They may be a business, but I'm now a *former* customer.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Seabound

Just another reason for me not to patronize Amazon.

Hear, Hear!

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

It is fairly homoerotic isn't it?

Only if you know it was written by Wilde and if you know of Wilde's tastes, I'd say.

[Ea]

They've done it now. No more buying from Amazon.

I could understand if it was gay romance - it can be pretty 'adult', but Maurice? And Lady Chatterley's Lover? Orlando?! Even if this is a glitch, this is just too stupid.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It never struck me that way, I have to confess.

SparkNotes has a "Discuss the role of homoeroticism in the novel." exam question, together with a suggested answer.

[deety]

They need to fix this and give us a detailed explanation, but assuming the de-listings are reversed then that glitch theory doesn't sound that far-fetched to me.

A person claiming to be a former Amazon employee commented on this cnet article saying that he (or she) had once made a programming error that similarly seemed to unfairly affect a group of books. The first customer service responses about adult material were probably correct - according to that supposed employee, the search results would be swamped with adult titles unless Amazon made an effort to control that. So maybe some kind of bug really did cause a lot of works with certain tags to be unfairly ranked as adult books.

Ordinarily, I'd tend to dismiss someone saying they were an insider as a fake post, especially because they conveniently avoid details by mentioning a non-disclosure agreement. But it's tough for me to believe that Amazon has suddenly implemented seriously homophobic policies. Their company's nondiscrimination policy includes sexual orientation. They offer medical and other benefits to same-sex partners of employees. They even have a GBLT employee group. Here's their Human Rights Campaign rating.

I know that Amazon has done things to earn the mistrust and bad feelings that a lot of people here seem to feel towards them, and I'm glad that people have been voicing their displeasure over this issue to the company. But maybe we should hold off on the torches and pitchforks and account canceling, just until we see how they respond now that the holiday weekend is over. But their fairly gay-friendly corporate policies make me want to give them the benefit of the doubt for a couple of days at least.

Of course the way that they've bungled some other problems makes me worry that they're just going to reinstate the listings and announce that they fixed the problem, with no further apology or explanation. I really hope they don't do that.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by hogleg

It's Amazon's store. They can run it how they want to. It's Amazon's kindle, so that argument doesn't hold water either. Maybe if they actively stopped you from putting it on there, I'd start to worry. You should have known that when electronic media finally made it mainstream, this would happen. The same thing happened when swedish video game developers started selling porn for the Atari.

Telling them what they have to sell is akin to telling them what they can not sell. If you don't like their business model, don't patronize them. It really is that simple. Don't get all up in arms about it, because I bet half of you have books you wouldn't show your mothers. I couldn't care less if you have them, but I'm not going to insist you can't hide them.

Well if it were Binky Dinky's online bookstore that nobody has heard of the above would hold, but Amazon *is* online book-selling for most people out there, so the community has a clear interest in its policies.

So complaining is absolutely legitimate, while everyone disagreeing with Amazon's decisions will make his/her own choices. I signed the petition and for now I hold off on further judgment until some more time passes and it is clear if this is Amazon's policy or just an error


But it's amazing how fast they are learning to annoy people badly...

[whitearrow]

Originally Posted by GlennD

This seems to be much ado about nothing. Gay and lesbian books are being taken off the sales rankings along with other adult material. So what? The only complain I can see is that the standards aren't evenly applied amongst adult books.

Yes, that's exactly the problem. "Gay/lesbian" as a category or metatag does not automatically = "adult" content. There are gay/lesbian themed books aimed toward young adults, there are non-fiction gay/lesbian books which have no explicit content, and there are even gay/lesbian fiction books which have nothing more than a kiss in them. It's a pretty sad comment when a classic, threshold work of gay fiction like Patricia Nell Warren's "The Front Runner" is stripped of its ranking, yet equally (if not more) explicit hetero trash like Jackie Collins rolls merrily along.

The same standards need to be applied to books about/with gays and lesbians as straight people. If a Nora Roberts romance with a fade-to-black scene between a man and a woman in it isn't "adult" then neither is the equivalent gay romance.

Amazon could solve any (perceived) problem with an opt-IN filter that would filter for honest-to-god erotica (the equivalent of NC-17 films), whether straight or gay/lesbian. It might also filter they, oh, 20,000+ sex toys that Amazon sells.

[hogleg]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

Well if it were Binky Dinky's online bookstore that nobody has heard of the above would hold, but Amazon *is* online book-selling for most people out there, so the community has a clear interest in its policies.

So complaining is absolutely legitimate, while everyone disagreeing with Amazon's decisions will make his/her own choices. I signed the petition and for now I hold off on further judgment until some more time passes and it is clear if this is Amazon's policy or just an error


But it's amazing how fast they are learning to annoy people badly...

I'd agree if that meant Apple had to be forced to allow FLAC playback, or if Kleenex had to be forced to take the flowers off their box.

Public ignorance is not and has not been a determining criteria for me, ever. It is why I still know the word "niggardly." Amazon is very large, but assuming B&N/Sprint/at&t/Whomever or Sony or any iTunes or any other media source exists, amazon is not "the only" anything.

It's a stupid move on their part, but I'll defend Amazon's right to sell/not sell what they please forever.

[Alisa]

Personally, I'm waiting to see how this plays out and if it's just a "glitch" as they claim. I can see ways that could be true. I also wouldn't mind if they gave people an option to exclude things with certain tags from their searches. They could even make an option for people to override public tags. Maybe they could even subscribe to a tagging and filter set. Groups that thought certain works were objectionable could make their own lists and their members could use them to filter their searches. I'm of the opinion that folks should have nothing to fear from knowing these books exist or seeing the cover when they're searching for something else, but if it makes them uncomfortable I have no problem with Amazon giving them the tools to make themselves comfortable. However, I think Amazon is heading into a quagmire if they try to filter these books themselves. They would do better to stay, for lack of a better term, agnostic on the matter. If they do embark upon this thankless process, they should at least give people a way to opt out of restricted search. If they do, I'd be curious to see the statistics on how people chose.

[carld]

I suspect that the "glitch" is that the script they were developing to do this fired off early and badly.

There's also some guy on LiveJournal claiming that he did this with a few simple scripts as revenge against gays tagging his ads on Craigslist. I have no idea if that's even possible.

[Moejoe]

Amazon Rep says this is definitely not a glitch (linked in from feministing.com)

http://www.feministing.com/archives/014797.html