Amazon Fail :P

[julieandrews]

Just found out about this while reading my flist. andpuff was the first on the list, but she's not the only one to have posted about it.

Apparently Amazon is stripping the sales ranks from books with gay romance in, on the grounds that it's adult material. Regardless of just how explicit the content is, or how explicit the straight romance books are.

This may be a case of a stupid code-goof and/or customer service not accurately replying to a query. I've had plenty of experience with customer service not answering the question I put to them, as if they hadn't actually read it, but just run a keyword search on it and hauled out the form response that seemed most likely to fit.

But if it's not, then Amazon needs to straighten up and fly right. (You can decide if that's a pun or not.)

Here is the post that I think originated it: http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html

And here's an lj with some explanation of what's going on, where you can find further links, and an explanation of why sales rank matters. http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/ meta_writer

ETA: There's an interesting theory at http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html that the problem originated in an individual or a group going around Amazon and tagging things as adult. And that Amazon's system relied on those tags enough to remove the sales rank/searchability of those books in an automatic way.

Interesting theory, quite possibly true, and really really stupid of Amazon. It's still a fail for Amazon because 1) their system is too trusting of a few tags/complaints, 2) the customer service people didn't reply well, 3) their PR people claiming it's an unspecified 'glitch' is inadequate and lame.

If that is what happened, they should tell everyone, and then they should fix their system so it can't be exploited this way again.

Comments

[chiieddy.livejournal.com]

Publisher's Weekly Article - http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6651080.html?desc=topstory

Amazon claims it was a glitch.