Created about 1 year ago,
Modified about 1 year ago
Amazon 'Glitch' Removes Sales Rank From Gay Books
NEW YORK (AP) -- A ''glitch'' on Amazon.com has caused the sales rank to be removed from gay- and/or lesbian-themed books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal and others.
''There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed,'' Amazon's director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, said in an e-mail Sunday.
As of Sunday night, books without rankings included Baldwin's ''Giovanni's Room,'' Vidal's ''The City and the Pillar'' and Jeanette Winterson's ''Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.'' The removals prompted furious remarks on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere online.
Craig Seymour, author of the gay memoir ''All I Could Bare,'' wrote on his blog Sunday that his sales rank was dropped in February, then restored nearly four weeks later, after he was told by Amazon that his book had been ''classified as an Adult product.''
Many belive this is not a glitch...
Authors such as Jaci Burton, Maya Banks, Larissa Ione and Stephanie Tyler have reported that since being stripped of their sales rankings, their titles are no longer found in searches on Amazon.com. MetaWriter is also compiling a list of titles that have been stripped of their sales rank.
When pressed for a reason, Amazon.com’s customer service department told YA author Mark Probst:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
It must be really tough being a stupid company on the Internet. Once you make a silly decision and it's out there, travelling via the Interwebs, you'll pay for it very dearly - and probably would be paying for it forever, as it is likely to become the first thing that customers discover about you on Google. We have a growing number of various consumer advocates blogs and online groups to thanks for that. The rise of Twitter has even compensated for the relative decline in the power of once very powerful blogs like The Consumerist - which have seen themselves somewhat silenced by the proliferation of aggressive "search engine optimization" services like ComplaintRemover.com, which remove / demote links to online complaints about companies and their products (or that Mother of All Complaints - their customer service). And still - blame it on social media, but almost every time I see a group of bloggers and social media guys take on a company that has made an outright stupid decision, they usually win. Not only because they are right, but because the company usually ends up paying much higher fees in publicity services to deal with a swell of the negative publicity - all embedded in the precious Google juice - than the losses it would incur from dealing with complaints from their conservative customers, who may want to restrict the publication of certain materials - be that photos of breast-feeding mothers or rankings of adult products.
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