I'm trying to find out what's going on with Amazon stripping sales ranks off of GLBT material. The only sources I have so far are livejournal entries. I don't want to fall prey to the "List of Books that Sarah Palin Tried to Ban" hysteria, so if anyone has any reputable sources on this story, I would greatly appreciate it. What I have read so far seems to indicate that Amazon is removing the sales rankings of books that might be deemed "objectionable" so they won't appear as high in their search results. The usual suspects appear in the list (Brokeback Mountain, Rubyfruit Jungle, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Well of Loneliness--for crying out loud!) Anyway, interested to know if this has been reported anywhere.
Edited to add: Can anyone clarify the relationship between alibris and Amazon. Alibris was my backup online bookstore of choice, but I think they've been bought out or taken over by Amazon, and if I have to boycott Amazon, then I'd have to steer clear of them as well.
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A friend of mine posted an article about this earlier and it seems that Amazon is now stating it was a bug that is being fixed. It should be interesting to see what the real deal was after all the twitters die down. This was the latest news I caught tonight: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10217715-93.html
ReplyDeleteI also think that Alibris and Amazon have split - something about Amazon wanted to connect directly to the independent booksellers and wanting to cut out the middleman (Alibris). I'm not sure though, anyone else got the scoop?
The Twit-storm seems to indicate that technical people don't buy into the glitch theory. The possibility that trolls might be gaming the system is interesting to me, but still indicates that Amazon is culpable, albeit in a less direct way. If they got pressured by the "family-friendly" forces to allow for user-generated tags, flags or complaints to boot a book out of their search results, that's a problem. Ah, the dangers of Web2.0! I'm trying not to judge until I find out more about what's going on, but it's difficult. The book I heard about getting de-ranked that really intensely bothered me was the Advocate College Guide for LGBT students. You can still find it if you search for it by name, but last night, I tried searching just for gay and college, and the first result was a college guide from 1994. 1994? In 1994, a lot colleges were still debating about whether they should display The Advocate on their magazine racks, or hide it behind the desk and make students ask for it! Whole different world today. Interestingly, the same search turns up different results this morning. Looks like they're working on the problem!
ReplyDeleteThe Alibris site still lists Amazon as a business partner, as well as Barnes and Noble and Borders among others:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.alibris.com/about/business-partners
As for the Amazon ranking issue, I was highly annoyed by it and I am keeping an eye on the situation as well. I hope that it was merely a software glitch gone wrong but I am not convinced...
Doreva
A sci-fi blog I read wrote an article about this earlier today:
ReplyDeletehttp://io9.com/5209403/amazoncom-banishes-queer-sf-writers-to-a-null-dimension
Not quite sure how valid it is, but I noticed it too.