Wizard's Blog

This issue is being covered in depth by newspapers, blogs and #amazonfail on Twitter so I won't echo the coverage too much, but apparently Amazon has "de-ranked" books with "adult content".  This seems to mean that the books don't show up in bestseller lists or even searches.

While at first glance this seems like a well intentioned "won't someone think of the children?" move, the de-ranking seems to have been implemented extremely unevenly.  Award winning books and romance novels are gone but Playboy is still there.  Gay people seem to be taking it personally, as apparently the first three results for "homosexuality" on Amazon.co.uk are all anti-gay.

While I don't tend to read romance novels or gay literature, literary censorship of any kind needs to be carefully examined - "they came for the gays and I didn't speak up because I wasn't gay" etc.

Image via Wikipedia

Assuming Amazon's motives are pure, it was a very clumsy move - there are much less controversial ways of achieving the goal, for example a Google style op-in/out safe search.

An interesting effect of this is the cyberactivism backlash that immediately took effect - there was talk of a boycott, and then a Google Bomb of the phrase Amazon Rank.

I think Amazon needs to realize that like Google they're so big that everything they do gets scrutinized, and take steps to avoid being painted as the bad guy.  Maybe it was just a PR failure more than anything else - I expect them to make a very public U-turn very soon.

To be honest I'm very surprised at how long it took them to make a statement about this - apparently they're blaming it on a glitch.

EDIT: And finally an official response:

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.

EDIT: Some people are now saying that it was actually caused by a hacker...

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