Amazon found itself crucified this Easter, and though it has since climbed down from the cross, it hasn't quite managed to claw the nails out of its hands and feet.
The story, in case you missed it: Sometime around Egg and Bunny day, Amazon mysteriously started removing the sales rankings of many gay and lesbian book titles, making them virtually invisible to the store's search engine -- effectively shoving them into the closet.
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Authors of those books (who obsess over things like their Amazon sales rank) began wondering what the hell happened. Word hit the Twittersphere and, well, excrement meet fan. The tag #amazonfail became the meme for the weekend.
The more bloggers looked into it, the worse it seemed. Titles like "Heather Has Two Mommies" got deranked, but not "The Parents' Guide to Preventing Homosexuality." Gay erotica and sexually themed memoirs were nixed, but not Playboy collections or the memoirs of hetero porn star Ron Jeremy.
Was Amazon pulling its own version of Proposition 8, quietly trying to ban unions between gay authors and their readers? You can imagine the turdstorm that followed on that line of thinking. Amazon's initial response -- it's a "glitch," we're looking into it -- did nothing to mollify the seething anger.
It took a day or so to get something resembling an explanation (and an apology) out of Amazon for what had happened, and even that was pretty darned vague:
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
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Download now »Perhaps I am being naive here but surely, if they were homophobic, the natural response would have been for them to stop selling such material full-stop. It could be that they did have a plan to censor things but I have to say that I am sceptical. I can't help but wonder whether we are these days, so tuned up to take offence, to see a slight in another's actions, that there is no room for anyone to make a genuine mistake. I am sure that there are times when items in other genres also became available through similiar erros; perhaps, though, they were in less sensitive areas.
As a final aside, I have to question whether comparing Amazon to a regime that kills people, might be, just ever so slightly, overstepping the mark.
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