Wow, I spent the day petting bunnies, and Amazon spent the day getting nailed to the wall by bloggers and Twitter users who took over Google results for “Amazon ranking” within an afternoon. Why? Books categorized as GLBT and Romance were being blocked in Amazon searches and top selling lists. Here’s the quick story from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a blog I’m excited to start reading. Follow the whole story there on their site.
“Amazon seems to be stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content.”
They they got Amazon’s response:
“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.”
Amazon ranking and sales being stripped means these books, as they say, don’t appear in best seller lists and major pages, which is obviously going to be murder on sales. Publishers Weekly cites Brokeback Mountain as one book that is now hidden in searches. Playboy books remain.
Smart Bitches posted at 11:22am this morning calling for readers to Google bomb the term “Amazon Rank.” I had never heard of Google bombing, but the premise is familiar to us all: Use a term enough times, and you’ll become the number one search result for that term. They also added an Urban Dictionary posting.
By 6:15 pm Smart Bitches was number one in results. By 9:13 Amazon had issued a few “we’re not sure, we’ll get back to you” type statements and then declared the whole thing a computer glych.
Twitter users, disemmenating information and links fast and furious like they do, came up with a host of responses, which you can search for with #amazonfail. (Hashes [#] are a way of creating a tag, or keyword, in Twitter. Go to the bottom of your Twitter page, click Search, and enter #amazonfail. You can also search for anything else of interest, such as #iPhone or # any major event.) I like this Amazon Fail logo and Dear Author post on how to contact Amazon.
As a lover of books, I’m always ticked to see censorship of any kind. Huzzah for a strong internet reaction.
Tags: ideas about the future of media, ideas about the internet, ideas about Twitter