Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the monumental fuck-up over at Amazon. This has already been reported in great detail, so I’ll try to keep it to a minimum: over the weekend, it emerged that Amazon was no longer including certain books in its sales ranking system and search results. The missing books were almost exclusively those with homosexual/bisexual content.
The story broke on the internet, most prominently on Twitter, and a veritable internet revolution ensued. People worked themselves into a frenzy, conspiracy theories abounded, would-be hackers “confessed”, and Googlebombing became the by-word of the day. And all the while, Amazon maintained an icy silence.
On Monday, Amazon finally deigned to issue a statement on the subject. From Drew Hardener to the Seattle PI:
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.
Many people dispute Amazon’s explanation of a cataloguing error, and see the incident as a move towards censorship, if not an outright homophobic agenda. While I don’t generally subscribe to conspiracy theories, something about this story just doesn’t sit right. It’s been widely reported that Amazon has introduced a new policy regarding the sale of adult material over the past few months. Author Craig Seymour (isn’t he CUTE?!) contacted them in February when his book dropped off the radar. His memoir, Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C., was stripped (heh, heh) of its sales rank back in February. When he contacted Amazon’s customer service about it, he was informed that this was due to its adult content. Seymour played around with the search engine and discovered that while his book was deemed inappropriate, Diablo Cody’s stripper memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper was still listed. Similarly, several gay memoirs had been deranked, but straight memoirs with erotic content were still there.
Whatever the true story, there are a lot of pissed off customers out there, including blogger Karen Scott. Karen’s latest post announces her intention to never shop at Amazon again and to remove the links to Amazon from her blog. Karen is not the only person to renounce Amazon and I can understand why.
So why can’t I bring myself to join the ranks of the dissenters? I find the idea of censorship appalling, especially when tinged with homophobia. However, I can’t bring myself to stop shopping at Amazon. The reason is simple: it would be a clear case of cutting off my nose to spite my face. I don’t live in an English-speaking country and what few English-language books are available in the bookstores are wildly over-priced. Amazon.de has an excellent range, extremely competitive prices and offers free shipping. By purchasing almost exclusively the US editions, I spend an average of €5 per book. The same books – if they can even be found in Swiss stores – cost an average of 18CHF (apx. €12). So it makes no financial sense for me to cease being an Amazon customer, much as I applaud those who do. This is something which makes me feel uncomfortable and I can only hope that Jeff Bezos and Co. assuage my guilty conscience by offering up a more plausible account of what, exactly, went wrong with their cataloguing system.
