This is absolutely ridiculous. Now, after the after the social regression North America experienced during the Bush regime, I suppose I shouldn’t find this entirely surprising, but it’s a bit late in Amazon’s history to pull the “sensitive customers” excuse — not that I would expect a retailer offering to bundle me up some Crest with a hardcover copy of Twilight to be a vanguard of library sciences and free speech. Reading over the list of stripped books and how arbitrary it is, it almost seems as if this is the work of one person with a chip on their shoulder, but for a merchant of Amazon’s size this is highly unlikely.
Incoming PR disaster in (NSFW for those of you who are reading)3, 2, 1…
Updated: epic backpedal. I suspect the handful of wage monkeys that publicly acknowledged the “new adult policy” will be out of work soon.
PR nightmare indeed (wish you’d have NSFW’d those 3,2,1 links tho)
It’s tough for me to believe that a major player like Amazon would have cleared the stripping of gay literature’s sales rankings – They’re there to make money, not statements.
It’s just to dumb to be sanctioned by the company – likely it was an employee who did it w/o clearance claiming to be inside the guidelines of things to remove.
Sucks it happened, people had the right to complain about it and point it out, and demand it be fixed, but they’re calling boycott now, and despite the fact that the boycott will fail, it’s probably not really justified.
Fixed.
The strange thing is, multiple authors who noticed their rankings getting stripped as far back as late February were told that this is in fact Amazon policy.
It may just be a case of a handful of Amazon employees stepping over their bounds and really messing things up, or a possible problem with a ranking system setting flags that is apparently trollable (theory outlined here). If this is the case it will certainly impact the design of user feedback systems in the future.