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Amazon.com removes rankings from 'adult' material, like Brokeback Mountain

post #1 of 8
4/12/09 at 8:51pm
Thread Starter 
This is something that I just learned about via Twitter, and it's pretty ridiculous. In the past couple of days, Amazon has removed sales rankings from material that it considers to be 'adult', but it turns out that the removal is disproportionally affecting materials with gay and lesbian themes. But you can still easily find Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds!

This is some serious bullshit, and the idea that Amazon took advantage of a slow-to-no news weekend is also crap.

Here are some links:

Ongoing list of books that were removed from the sales rankings

Open letter regarding the policy with an explanation here.

A further explanation, with a letter template and contact info here.

Or, you could help google bomb the term "Amazon Rank" here.
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post #2 of 8
4/12/09 at 9:01pm
To clarify why this matters: removing sales ranking on specific titles means that they won't show up on Amazon's bestseller lists, even if they outsell Harry Potter.

To use the example the L.A. Times cited, Bret Easton Hollis' American Psycho doesn't appear to have been found in need of this new "adult" segregation from Amazon's sales ranking, but Nathaniel Frank's Unfriendly Fire: How The Gay Ban Undermines The Military And Weakens America does.
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post #3 of 8
4/12/09 at 9:05pm
Thread Starter 
Yeah, I wasn't clear about that. It also has to do with searching for titles -- the rankings are what determine what shows up first/top of the page, and if something's stripped of its ranking, it won't show up at all.
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post #4 of 8
4/12/09 at 9:11pm
This sucks, but I don't love the idea of pointing out what still is searchable as some kind of argument. Yeah, you want to point out inconsistencies - where gay material gets harsher treatment than comparably explicit straight material - but I've seen bloggers use the opportunity to attack the availability of Mein Kampf, books on dogfighting, etc. How about we just let all books be searched, instead of saying one kind of subject matter is better than another - which is what started this problem in the first place.
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post #5 of 8
4/12/09 at 9:14pm
Thread Starter 
I agree with you, for the most part. But I saw the argument as not "Mein Kampf/American Psycho/that dogfighting book* should have their rankings removed," but more pointing out that these books still have rankings, which have pissed way more people and are more "adult" (at least in the case of Playboy and American Psycho) off than some of the other titles that don't anymore.

*Which I found kind of silly, since it's from 1888 and clearly meant to be a historical document. It's not like "Dogfighting for Dummies by Michael Vick."
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post #6 of 8
4/12/09 at 9:22pm
Definitely. And don't let my contrarianism distract from the issue that Amazon really did screw up here.
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post #7 of 8
4/12/09 at 9:43pm
I never doubted ya, James. The pointing out of some titles is a shorthand for pointing out that two sets of standards exist, but you're correct to say it's a clumsy shorthand.
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post #8 of 8
4/13/09 at 9:57pm
Update: Today Amazon copped to a cataloguing error and apolgized.

From an Amazon customer service email quoted on Americablog:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Meanwhile, Wired ran a story quoting someone who claimed to have hacked Amazon to tinker with its rating system. Wired has since dismissed that person as a troll.
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