April 12th, 2009
by
Ide Cyan
Amazon, the multinational online book (& other media) seller, has begun implementing a new policy change which has the effect of suppressing hundreds of GLBT-themed titles under misleading and injurious pretexts.
The sales ranks of an increasingly large number of titles dealing with homosexuality have been stripped from their listings, in order to exclude them from best seller lists, which makes it impossible to track their popularity on Amazon now, and also affects internal search results, which are tied into the popularity of the books, effectively suppressing the presence of these titles on Amazon’s online inventory by making them much more difficult to find, although the Amazon listings for some titles may still appear — for now — at or near the top of Google search results.
The pretext for this suppression is the exclusion of “adult” content, implying sexual content, from best-seller lists, but the reality of this is that material dealing with homosexuality is targetted regardless of its sexual content: erotica and romance novels are not the only casualties. Children’s books such as Heather Has Two Mommies, and classic gay-themed literature from E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, to more recent novels from Sarah waters and Tiptree Award-winner Nicola Griffith, as well as informative self-help guides for teenagers, and sociology texts that are queer-friendly or feminist, are indiscriminately suppressed; whereas popular heterosexual erotica, homophobic texts, and collections of Playboy photographs are still allowed keep their sales rankings.
Here is an early report on the LJ community meta_writer, which quotes an Amazon representative answering an author’s query as to why the sales ranks for his Young Adult, gay-themed novel were no longer listed:
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 Services
Amazon.com Advantage
The Meta Writer community has contact information for Amazon in their list of related links, and another entry contains an evolving list of suppressed titles: Amazon Censorship – Who is affected?, with many links to the titles in question. (NB: heavy loading time for that page, due to the number of titles and comments adding more.)
Many authors and readers are calling for action. The subject is being followed on Twitter, too: search under the term “#amazonfail“.
There is an online petition protesting the new policy here, but the effectiveness of online petition being disputable, contacting Amazon directly might be more effective, though some people are reporting finding it difficult to get in touch with the company.
The policy change affects not only the USA-based Amazon.com, but also Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca .
Here are some additional links on the subject:
Blog entry “Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?” at Jezebel. (Heavy loading.)
CNET news article: “Amazon criticized for de-ranking ‘adult’ books”
LA Times Blog entry: Amazon de-ranks so-called adult books, including National Book Award winner(found via Ambling Along the Aqueduct)
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Filed under Art & Graphics, Books & Literature, Publishing, Sexuality & queerness | Comments (11)
[...] and I had intended to write a thoughtful post about it. But really, do I need to? Not just because others have done so, but because you really don’t need long and thoughtful to grasp [...]
It is not only LGBT-themed books that are affected. Books on disability and sexuality (http://lisybabe.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazonfail.html) as well as well as feminist books and books on sexuality (http://melissagira.com/sexerati/2009/04/12/amazon-removes-sales-rank-from-sexuality-queer-titles/). Books on suicide prevention and rape have also had their rankings removed.
It’s also affecting academic books. You won’t find Queer Universes, my own anthology, if you simply open a browser window and search for the title. Nor will you find some other academic books with “queer” in the title, such as Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. I wonder what Amazon thinks is “adult” about these books? Perhaps the use of words of more that two syllables?
Amazon.jp too:
http://kagedreams.livejournal.com/209940.html.
I think I remember on Mark Probst’s original post to the effect that amazon.de has also been caught up in this, as well, but can’t find the link.
Brinstar & Wendy: yes, those have been affected too.
The longer this goes on the more improbable and wacky it seems. While I don’t have a lot of hope/respect for the greater good of amazon.com (at all) there’s a *lot* of fail going on here. And not just feminist/queer/intelectual-based political fail, but technology fail, and public relations fail as well.
I can’t believe that amazon would go about the process of editing search results by hand, internally. You’d think that they’d sell preferential search responses at the very least, before they started censoring the list. And what’s more, the application of the censoring is very uneven. It hit academic books, quasi-mainstream cultural critique books that weren’t particularly radical (Female Chauvinist Pigs; I think some Camile Paglia’s stuff as well), some queer stuff was untouched.
Censorship is always uneven, particularly over large datasets, that’s sort of the point, but this is so particularly uneven that it seems unlikely that this is the result of a single monolitic ideological mission from within amazon.
There’s been some talk, particularly after the release of the “glitch” press release (see, above with regards to “public relations fail”) that some sort of public ranking feature that allowed users to flag books as being inappropriate, went awry and delisted things that had passed some threshold. This would account for the unevenness, for sure.
The questions, that I’d have for amazon, then, aren’t “why are you censoring queer folk’s books,” but rather:
- Why are you allowing anyone to censor anything of your search results? A well indexed, easily search able inventory is what makes amazon valuable, if search isn’t reliable, you won’t be as valuable nor sell as many books. What gives?
- Why are you letting this PR disaster continue on without providing information that would defuse it? More reliable information in this situation could only help matters for you and your customers. What’s up with this tightliped “glitch” press releases when you have blogs and twitter?
- What the hell happened with that customer service? Even if it were true, I can’t fathom wanting a customer service rep. to give that kind of answer. Seriously, yo?
Beyond that, my mind boggles.
It looks like the problem is in the process of being fixed, although Amazon’s PR in dealing with it has been problematic as well.
From what I’ve heard it seems to have been a combination of their filtering policy (to exclude porn), content tagging (which is done on purpose, and possibly affected by miscommunication issues, but also with a long history of bias), and coding changes — the only part that can be described as a “glitch” — coming into effect to prejudiciably filter titles according to new tags or to tags that hadn’t led to filtering before. According to Amazon’s statement, 57,310 titles were affected.
Amazon still needs to apologise to the authors of the works they discriminated against, to recognise that there was a problem beyond the so-called “glitch”, in the system that led to the problem (the biases in tagging and filtering) and in the management of the problem, in responding to user complaints and in publicly addressing those complaints.
See Lilith Saintcrow’s entry about the coding according to a source, and the comments questioning the plausibility of blaming a French programmer for the tagging of thousands of English-language books, and her other amazonfail-related entries for more.
And Kelley Eskridge on The lessons of Amazonfail in terms of management issues.
Ide thanks for posting the new links, I’ve been frustrated with this whole mess: first at amazon for the screw up, of course, but then later at the inept analysis that proliferated madly over the weekend. I’m glad that there’s more reason prevailing.
AfterEllen and AfterElton present: the Lesbian Kindle and the Gay Kindle!
[...] Amazon suppresses GLBT titles. As other commentators have pointed out not only is this offensive, but its inexplicable. I don’t get it. How could this possibly help business? I am not exactly prepared to boycott Amazon, but still . . . [...]