In a time of economic uncertainty, you know what a really great idea is? Doing something so stupid that you piss off half your customer base.
Amazon, massive online book retailer, has removed a whole whack of titles from their sales rankings because of "adult content." In many cases, this means those books don't show up in a search of the Amazon site, either. One wonders how Amazon plans to sell these phantom books. One also wonders how Amazon defines adult content. The answer? "As poorly as everyone else who's ever tried it." In one of the more ridiculous examples, Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (complete with horrific serial killings) still shows up, but Unfriendly Fire, a book about queers and American military policy, is apparently too racy for us.
Books with queer content are disproportionately represented (or unrepresented, I guess) in this new system, regardless of whether that content consists of frolicsome fisting threeways or the mere mention of our existence. Also missing in action are romance and erotica titles (though which ones appears to be a crapshoot), and I'm sure there's more.
The internets are already ablaze with fury, and I think some fury is warranted. But you know what else is warranted? Hysterical laughter. Seriously, Amazon? Seriously? What were you thinking?
I'm with the Smart Bitches on this one. I say we Google Bomb them. Click for a new definition:
Amazon Rank
ETA: Apparently Amazon is now claiming that it's a glitch and not a new policy. And you know, if they had offered this as the first explanation, I'd've been willing to believe it, because the alternative is just so mindbogglingly dumb. But here are a couple of points to consider.
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5 comments:
OMFG!! GTFO AMAZON!!!
Um, ok, in people speak: What a bunch of asshats.
The thing that's way more upsetting though is the revelation of just how screwed you are, in today's publishing market, if Amazon does delist you. And at least Amazon has some kind of competition - can you imagine what would happen to a political movement that Google took against? Or Facebook? Or (shortly) Twitter?
How is it that the internet, which was supposed to be a force for diversity and liberation, seems to have entered a stage where it's fostering new monopolies every six months to a year?
Hey, do you remember the stuff that happened to Spore on Amazon? When people got mad that the game was going to have the SecuROM security program built in they went crazy and spammed it on Amazon to make its rating go to zero stars. Amazon then decided to delete the comments section for the game. People then went even more crazy, and after a few days Amazon put the comments section back and claimed it was all a glitch.
Thus, this was no glitch. Amazon, like many businesses and governments, is just trying to see how far they can go. When they meet too much resistance they back off. But, sadly, this will not be the end of their discrimination. They will seek other avenues of approach until they find one that people don't notice or don't care about.
Hooray, now we all get to witness fascism's birth on the internets! Aren't we lucky?
Just read that the sales numbers are back, Amazon has fixed their "glitch."
Wonder how long it'll take them to live this down...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090414.wgtamazon0314/BNStory/Technology/home
Kendra
I'm inclined to believe, not so much that this was a conspiracy against queers, but rather, a set of poorly reasoned decisions with some underpinning homophobia (among other problematic assumptions). We're too big a market, and the company is not one with frothing bigots at the helm. But the conflation of "queer" with "porn" is a common and disturbing one, and I think it deserves a response every time.
And yeah, it's distressing to watch huge swaths of stuff come and go like this on the internets. It's one of the reasons to value small retailers in our local communities--while not everyone has equal access to, for example, queer-friendly bookstores, if you do have the access you can hear about a lot of books that aren't typically featured by larger stores. (Big retailers with knowledgeable staff can do some of the same things for us, they're just not as focused.)
Kendra: potentially, a very, very long time to live this down I think, which is why I'm surprised they did such a shitty job of handling the press around it. Their damage control team is so fired.
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