Amazon begins to re-rank affected 'adult' books; theories swirl [UPDATED]

UPDATED, 3:03 p.m. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener sent us the following statement, blaming the entire situation on a "cataloging error":

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.

-----

The unexplained de-ranking of books on Amazon.com this weekend kindled an inferno of Internet outrage, the likes of which is seen only a couple of times a year. Meanwhile Twitter has shown that if you're looking to start a righteous conflagration, there's no better way to quickly add ten thousand twigs to the fire. 

Amazon now appears to be undoing the damage -- as of this writing the so-called "adult" books that were at the center of this controversy are now ranked again -- Mark Probst's "The Filly", Leslea Newman's "Heather has Two Mommies," and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence. (Bloggers have speculated that when a book loses its sales ranking, it becomes harder to find on the site.) Ranks have also been given back to a bunch of the other books on this list kept by the bloggers at Jezebel.

But for most of the day, cries of censorship, boycotts plans and petitions were flying around like dollar bills in a money tornado, characterized -- as in most mob frenzies -- by a striking absence of facts.

Blame Amazon for that. After more than a day of exceptionally bad PR, the online sales giant -- whose stated goal is to "be Earth's most customer-centric company" has said nothing except that their system had experienced a "glitch." "Glitch," of course, has entered the public relations lexicon as a synonym for "a bungle you'd like to sugarcoat by blaming it on computers." In this Twitterized world, Amazon's tortoise-like slowness is even more stark -- would it kill them to tweet one small update?

Meanwhile, the thousands of participants in the AmazonFail conversation are moving the mystery forward themselves. Earlier today, a LiveJournal blogger took credit for the situation, saying he'd used some simple programming to systematically catalog all gay and lesbian books in the Amazon database, then used that information to mount a feedback attack on the books in question: the idea being that if a book gets enough negative user feedback, it is automatically de-ranked. 

Another LiveJournal blogger named Bryant Durrell took the first guy's programming code and showed that it didn't work. But both he and Bart Leib, a third LiveJournal blogger (I haven't seen this much LiveJournal since the other mass-deletion controversy) speculated that even if the phony bad guy didn't do it, the scandal still has the pungent aroma of online pranksterism. If there was indeed a way for determined saboteurs to flag books as inappropriate, it might have made sense for Amazon to remove the entries while it considered the merits of the complaints. 

The problem is, there's no button to complain about a given book or product. Instead, users are offered the chance to leave text-based feedback for a product, a mechanism that would be much harder to manipulate with any real speed. 

Well, anyway, we'll probably have our answer soon. We've just heard that Amazon is planning to release more information about the glitch. 

-- David Sarno

Comments

[overamazon]

They did it on purpose at first...no one caught it or said anything read this article: http://tinyurl.com/d6plhj

[Edward Virtually]

Your claim that there is "a striking absence of facts" to support the conclusion the Amazon's censorship was not a glitch but an intentional act is incorrect. As numerous blog and news articles (perhaps you should read some) describe, many blatantly sexual heterosexual books remained ranked while homosexuality related books that did not include sexual references were deranked. I have no idea why you are trying defend Amazon's obnoxious behavior, but you do little but discredit yourself as a reporter by doing so.

[SeanBoy]

Amazon: Ooops, my bad.

[here here]

Edward Virtually is absolutely right. I checked around Amazon and found plenty of ranked heterosex erotic, while similar gay erotic was deranked. This excuse from Amazon is only slightly less lame than the "glitch" excuse.

[dilford]

What part of "It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search" did you not understand when you wrote "(Bloggers have speculated that when a book loses its sales ranking, it becomes harder to find on the site.)"?

[Brian]

I have to say, the use of 'kindled' to describe a problem at Amazon was funny...

> The unexplained de-ranking of books on Amazon.com this weekend kindled
> an inferno of Internet outrage, the likes of which is seen only a couple of
> times a year.

[Etaoin]

Amazon takes an arrogant approach with its customers,refusing to discuss anything or ever admit an error. How does an error become "ham-fisted"? This still doesn't sound right.

[gay writer, pasadena]

A "striking absence of facts" Sarno? Well, leave it to a Times reporter to protect corporate interests at all costs. Amazon displayed the typical homophobic belief that anything "gay" or "lesbian" is dirty. But leave it to the newspaper who puts TV ads on the front page of the paper to protect them. I would expect nothing less.

[Tierra Del Fuego]

Yea, Amazon has a lot to answer for, and you may ad this to the list. Nine days after I purchased a gay history book from Amazon, I began to get weird emails addressed to me, sent by my own email address, with headers like, "Your Amazon Account," or "Your Amazon Shipment." I tried every action to notify Amazon that a highjack had taken place in their internal GI track, but heard nothing back. This happened in February 2008 and I still receive these bizarre emails; again, addressed to me and sent using my own email address. Have the Anti-Gay NET weenies infiltrated the Amazon system?

[Edward Virtually]

[UPDATED :-]

It has become difficult to know what to believe about the situation. Amazon's original "glitch" explanation did not seem very credible. Their expanded "cataloging error" version could just be PR rephrasing, it could be true. Of perhaps more import is the claim by a hacker who claims to have engineered the deranking by subverting Amazon's offensive product reporting feature, and the technical details of their method are realistic. This would lend credence to the "cataloging error" really meaning "hacker induced cataloging error". Amazon has disclaimed the hacker's claim, but they would regardless of the truth for PR reasons. But the important thing is that the changes are being reversed, so knowing why is not overly so.

[Eleanor's Trousers]

Amazon's failure to respond more quickly, more apologetically, and more thoroughly will lose them more business in this fast-paced PR cycle than the "glitch" itself, or how well it is revolved.

Unfortunately, by the time I (and other AmazonFail-ers) had 24 hours to simmer, the damage is done. What that says about the news cycle and how easy it is to lose a customer's business these days.

I suspect in years to come this will be an often-used example of bad PR in business schools (the New Coke of 2009).

[J. L. Jensen]

What bothers me is that this 'cataloguing error' seems to have included a lot of books listed under Amazon.com's 'Gay & Lesbian' category, whether or not they had any 'adult' content at all. Why?

Who at Amazon.com decided that a book in the category Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs = adult but a book in the category Biographies & Memoirs > General, even though it's cross listed under Nonfiction > Social Sciences> Pornography was not?

The biography of Ellen Degeneres was de-ranked, the biography of porn star Ron Jeremy was not.

Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if, instead of GLBT books, this error had involved African-American books? If it had been President Obama's biography that had been de-ranked instead of Ellen Degeneres'?

Just something to think about...

[David W.]

I am upset by the mob mentality over this issue. Amazon didn't respond quick enough? The problem started on Sunday night, and by early Tuesday morning, it was in the process of being fixed. Considering this is Easter and Passover weekend, Amazon may also be short technical staff.

This is a company that has thousands of gays and lesbians working for them. Put its headquarters in Seattle which is almost a liberal community as you can get, and its CEO has been a contributor to many Democratic candidates. This company has absolutely no history of discrimination or support of politics of anything that could point to discrimination, yet within hours, people were already boiling the tar and bringing out the feathers.

I work in large corporate environments. Sometimes you don't know what caused a problem. Was it some hacker playing a cruel joke? Was it the result of a careless employee (or maybe a malicious act of an employee?) Could a software or database update cause the problem? What is the exact cause? How extensive is the damage? What will it take to fix the issue?

Amazon called it a glitch? Well, something happened to Amazon that Amazon didn't mean to happen, and that's all Amazon knows. What would you call it?

Go complain to Amazon. Insist upon a full explanation. Let Amazon know how you feel. But why all the calls of boycotts and conspiracy theories that would gladden the heart of Glenn Beck? Why the petitions and the t-shirts?

It is so easy to get caught up in this type of mob rule with instantaneous communication through tools like Twitter. We have to be careful. So far, thousands of people have posted on the web that they'll never buy from Amazon again. There has been pressure on companies like Dropbox to stop using Amazon's S3 service. And, yet there is absolutely no evidence that Amazon had done anything.

In this day and age, someone can post something about you on YouTube completely out of context, and with in a few days, you can become one of the most vile and despised people on this planet -- all before you can even say one word in your defense.

[Dusk Peterson]

"I haven't seen this much LiveJournal since the other mass-deletion controversy"

It's actually pretty much the same community that's been affected; hence the LiveJournal connection. Last time through, the call of warning came from the slash fiction community (i.e. gay fan fiction). This time through, the call of warning came from the gay romance community; a number of the authors who initially realized what had happened had made their literary start in the slash fiction community (and have said so publicly, so I'm not giving any secrets away). Those authors, as well as other gay romance authors and readers, were the ones who sent out the first alerts to the the rest of the world as to what had happened. The slash and gay romance communities are blessed with some very energetic writers who automatically react this way when controversies arise.

[Will]

David W., you're ignoring or ignorant of crucial information that has been available since the story broke. We *know* that (at least at one time) this was official Amazon policy. Mark Probst (the original whistleblower) asked Amazon where his (YA, non-explicit) book had gone, and got this response:

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

From his journal here (http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html). Craig A. Seymour (whose book was de-ranked in February) was given the run-around by Amazon customer service and then finally also told that his book was too adult to be listed (http://craigspoplife.blogspot.com/2009/04/my-amazonfail-timeline.html), while Ron Jeremy's memoir, sex toys, and books on dogfighting were not.

Honestly, I can't think of any way that those bits of evidence don't point to the conclusion that Amazon, as a company, is responsible for this mess. If you have a compelling alternate explanation, I'd love to hear it.

Part of your disapproval about this behavior seems to stem from different ways you and many of the #amazonfail twitterers use the internet. They (we) are used to compiling information from many different internet sources to come up with actual proof in situations like these -- there was already a hacker hypothesis proposed, tested, and discarded before your made your comment.

We can agree to disagree about what's appropriate response time, but it's far from correct to say that Amazon is an injured party or the victim of one malicious bigot. It's them. We know it's them. That's why everyone's upset.