wshaffer | (no subject)

I'm still trying to figure out the latest Amazon.com follies. What seems to have happened, as far as I can make out: Some eagle-eyed Amazon users noticed over the weekend that a suspiciously large number of books with LGBT content had lost their Amazon sales rankings, causing them not to show up in search results. An Amazon customer service representative explained that this was part of a new policy that "adult" material should not show up in searches. There was an internet kerfuffle, and now Amazon is saying that there is no new policy, this is a glitch, and they're working on fixing it.

Riiight.

There's a glitch somewhere, all right. Probably not in the site software.

What I can't figure out is how they thought for a nanosecond that they were going to get away with this. I know what writers are like. Mess with their Amazon sales rank at your peril.

I am rather disappointed with Amazon, not so much for the initial behavior (hey, we all have boneheaded ideas sometimes), but for the less-than-forthright way they seem to be dealing with the fallout.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, it does rather look as though the right hand and the left weren't talking to one another. The PR people seem to've been given a bit of boilerplate to fob off the authors (and later, other outraged parties) with, and little idea of what *actually* was going on.

What I can't figure out is how they thought for a nanosecond that they were going to get away with this.

Ditto. I think they were surprised at the speed of indignation on the Internet from large groups of people.