Angry Left Nearly Births Cow Over Amazon.com Glitch
Got Anger?
The angry left ended up throwing eggs at themselves when they jumped to conclusions about a glitch on Amazon.com. The glitch was first noted by choleric gay author Mark Probst:
On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system?
I would agree that it would be silly of Amazon to delist GLBT books, no matter how awful some of them are. Probst contacted Amazon.com support to find out what was going on. Unfortunately, Amazon support inadvertently fanned the flames with a confusing and uninformed 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.
If you’re part of the angry left, this automatically means that Amazon is labeling all GLBT books as “adult” and you thusly press the big red “ENRAGED” button on ye olde billionaire funded Lefty-Blogosphere-omatic, and declare:
Spread the word. Amazon will be beside itself in the face of all this fury!
Well, now Probst, ThinkProgress and lefties on Twitter who declared they would boycott Amazon look like utter fools:
Publisher’s Weekly now has a story here, that an Amazon spokesperson claims this is all a glitch and they have no such new policy.
DOH!
Feeling sheepish and ashamed, Probst felt the need to explain while wiping the egg off his face:
My caselog is still active in my Advantage account with the response from customer service rep Ashlyn D. Also I’d like to point you to this blog of an author who received this same response from Amazon back in February. Amazon has some ’splainin’ to do!
Too bad Probst doesn’t see the folly of gettin’ yourself all worked up before you know what the hell is going on.
Remember this next time the lefties jump all over the righties for overreacting to something.
4/14 UPDATE: The Seattle PI has the scoop on what really happened:
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.
and
According to Daisey’s inside sources, “A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up ‘adult,’ which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like ‘erotic’ and ’sexuality.’ That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon.”
But, I’m sure the Angry Left will go on to enshrine this incident as another Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy that they thwarted through the SHEER FORCE of their Twitter Fury.
Toni said,
April 13, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Except that this has been happening to authors for the past few months, and just came to a head over the weekend.
But way to end up with egg on your OWN face.
Smellerbee said,
April 13, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I would be more sympathetic to your outrage if you didn’t completely ignore far worse behavior from your own side.
Ben Grivno said,
April 13, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I agree that the right has it’s own trolls. If you see any truly disrespectful behavior from top right wing bloggers, feel free to alert me and I will be more than happy to feature it.
Ken Browning said,
April 13, 2009 at 4:55 pm
So the lesson I’m to take away from this is that jumping to conclusions results in eggy faces. An important lesson to learn.
When did you get confirmation that this was indeed a “glitch” despite so much evidence to the contrary? Or are you jumping to conclusions?
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