As of Monday morning (Eastern time), we still don’t know if the Amazon issues this weekend were a glitch, homophobia (and disabilityphobia and feministphobia and rapesurvivorphobia), or outside attack. Some people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt pointing out that the failing possibly came from the weakness of large companies with sprawling departments (but doesn’t excuse it)-Patrick Nielsen Hayden on how large corporations work, and Simon Bisson on why Amazon hasn’t fixed things immediately-while others, like the blog queerty, are still calling for heads.
But from the outside, here’s what we KNOW happened: many, many books, focusing mainly on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, disabled, feminist, and sexual abuse issues (this included Heather Has Two Mommies, a bio of Ellen DeGeneres, and Paul Monnette’s 1992 National Book Award winner Becoming a Man) were pulled from the Amazon search rankings. What this means is that they won’t show up on bestseller lists, and searching for general topics (for example, “homosexuality” – imagine if you were a kid struggling with some issues and saw this search…) will not reveal the books.
It was a holiday weekend. Amazon is on the west coast. So I’m going to be watching keenly later today to see how they deal with this. I really can’t see the largest bookseller consciously doing a censoring action this huge and not addressing it, or fixing it ASAP.
But what concerns me is the response of some of people. Not even homophobes – just people who didnt really understand why this matters. Many authors were outraged at seeing their own books pulled. But one comment on a blog scared the crap out of me. Someone said that their books weren’t pulled, so they weren’t too upset.
By the electric hammer of Thor, are you insane?
I’m not gay, I don’t write books with queer themes, and I know this action – whatever the cause – is bad news for all authors and readers. As a reader, if you want to search for a book but can’t remember the title or the author, but it’s got this lesbian as the heroine and you remember the general theme, searching on amazon won’t help you.
And I can tell you, as a small press author who can probably safely say at LEAST 90% of my sales have come through Amazon, having your ranking pulled is a nightmare. If people are just looking for a general book about your theme, they’re not going to find it. And that kills your sales.
And also, it matters because, as Neil Gaiman says, once they censor the stuff that YOU don’t agree with, or even care about, they will have the precedent to censor more, and eventually they will censor the stuff that you think is OK, and then maybe they will censor the stuff that you actually like, and then you will think, “Oh no! We must stand up and FIGHT this!” And everyone will look at you, tired and beaten, and say, “Where the hell were you last year, jerk?”
As Gaiman says [the brackets are mine]-
Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like [or write], when they come for the stuff you do like [or write], you’ve already lost.
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20 Responses to Why #amazonfail matters
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That one comment makes me think back to Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came…”
If that author doesn’t stand up for the rest now, there’ll be no one left to stand up for them when it’s their turn.
Oh, absolutely. People are so naive about their rights. You can’t stop Nazis from peaceful demonstration because if you do, they can stop you too. You can’t make Rush Limbaugh be quiet, unless he crosses legal lines, because if you do, they will make someone important be quiet as well.
You can’t censor one type of books, because you don’t know when your type of book will be next.
Big Brother is always looking for a way to get his sticky fingers into your world…
And by the way (lol) “By the electric hammer of Thor, are you insane?” I LOVE THAT
Norse gods must not be forgotten, by Odin. I wonder if Loki works at Amazon?
Thanks for this. Some Twitter messages I’m reading say “This doesn’t affect me, so I’m not interested.” Having Amazon decide which books you should be ‘protected’ from affects EVERYONE.
I need to buy your novel Playing for Keeps, too. Just not through Amazon.
Stan Scott
I’m confused by the search aspects. I heard that these books won’t show up in search…and yet they seem to.
That said, I’m not giving Amazon a pass on this. But I am giving them time to fix it before I start calling for a boycott or whatever. I’m glad it became the issue it has, because apparently a few lone voices have been trying to draw attention to the issue for a while now.
Like you, I really can’t conceive of a store as big as Amazon deliberately targeting guy & lesbian topics. I figure someone wrote a script that tries to ‘clean’ the sales rankings, and the script isn’t working correctly.
That said, is it right for Amazon to be removing *any* books from sales rankings? Shouldn’t the ‘bestseller’ lists be more honest?
Gaiman’s response echoes Niemöller’s about standing up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
The initial germ of an idea for Amazon’s change may have been a decent one. They may get the kinks worked out yet. (No puns intended.) Certainly, though, I think enough hubbub has been dusted up to make sure that they do *something*.
Hmmm, bad URL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came
“Some people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt (Patrick Nielsen Hayden on how large corporations work [...] )”
Did I say that? I could have sworn I wrote “None of which means that anyone shouldn’t be mad at Amazon, or that Amazon shouldn’t be embarrassed.”
I already have people yelling at me on Twitter and in comments because they appear to think I’m defending Amazon, as if anything short of rolling the tumbrils is a call for love and forgiveness. Sheesh.
All I was addressing was the mechanics of how stuff like this happens — and I concluded by observing that a lot of racism and homophobia happens this way, through following a path of least resistance rather than deciding “Say, I’ll be actively hateful today! That’ll be fun!” Why this should land me on an alleged “side” arguing in defense of Amazon, I dunno.
Pete- if you search for the books themselves (like “Brokeback Mountain”) you will find them. If you search for themes (for example, “gay cowboy love story”) you will have less luck.
Patrick- my bad, will edit the post. My point wasn’t clear. Apologies.
Mur, once again I agree with you. There is almost no way I can picture amazon doing this intentionally as it would be shooting themselves in the foot AND it goes against most of what I’ve seen of them and their corporate culture (of which I was a part 10 years ago). This screams of screw up internally (as Patrick describes), or screw up internally that allowed for external manipulation (which is my inclination… seems similar to the creationist vote-bot attacks on youtube evolution videos to me).
Amazon hasn’t been the best about disclosing how they’ve been gamed before, so I’m not sure they’ll be forthcoming with details, but I don’t buy that this was intentional censorship on their part (they tend to avoid that game because it would screw SO heavily with their business).
ALL that said, the reason it matters is, as you & Neil point out, not what was targeted, but THAT it was targeted. I think one of the problems with the outrage I’ve seen is that so many assume corporate bigotry (bigot!) and not incompetence allowing for a cultural bigotry to be highlighted. If the literary world is busy screaming “amazon hates gay people” and not concerning itself with the bigger picture of free exchange of ideas it’s missing the point.
I find an interesting analogy with the “de-planeting” of Pluto. Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks about it in the latest Point of Inquiry podcast and he makes the brilliant point that by focusing on Pluto as a planet/not-planet we’re concerning ourselves with a memorization of a list instead of real education about the make-up of the solar system (gas giants, icy kyper belt objects like Pluto, rocky planets, bullwinkle planets, etc).
By focusing on “amazon hates gay people” as the point instead of “censorship has happened” we’re missing the more interesting and relevant area for discussion. Amazon has shown in the past they’re not likely to promote a censoring of their listings. But, by generating outrage against amazon instead of using this as a means of promoting a discussion relating to censorship in general, we’re missing an opportunity.
Amazon needs to be taken to task for this happening, but so much of this seems to be misdirected rage and offense about certain points of view instead of actually recognizing the real issue. I have faith amazon will fix this, it’s not in their best interest to allow it to stand (or for it to have happened in the first place, but that ship has sailed).
This was a well-written and rational entry. Kudos to you.
I am outraged, but am mostly waiting to hear Amazon’s side before lighting the torches. Well, Amazon’s REAL side, as the whole “glitch” comment sounds beyond bogus. Plus I’m up to my eyeballs preparing for next month’s move from London to Cary so finding my living room is a slightly higher priority today. Tomorrow I should have time for a good mobbing
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I can’t believe people would be either so naive or short-sighted as to think if their books weren’t affected or if “only” the gay books were affected then it’s not a big deal. If this was a deliberate act, either from within Amazon or from outside do they think that people who would do that will then be finished? This would just be Round 1 to them.
I happen to have been reading a bunch of gay themed books, romances etc lately, as I’m researching that market (and they’re just fun!) and so I was familiar with a few of the best-selling author names in those categories and have been doing some searching on those names on Amazon’s UK site today. It depends how you do the search, but there are definitely times they should be in the search results and they weren’t.
Holy crap, I had no idea this happened. That’s AWFUL. How was the problem discovered? And, has there been any real explanation yet?
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It seems the goal at Amazon was to keep “adult” themed books out of the normal search (much like Google’s “safe search” is supposed to keep out porn). But the execution was way off and many “normal” titles got incorrectly flagged.
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Amazon either:
a) deliberately reduced sales by censored it’s own products,
or
b) made a mistake.
I vote the latter and computerworld seems to back me up:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131538
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