Amazon's public statement explaining the de-ranking of books having GLBTQ themes, as well as many other books on sexuality, is vague and disingenuous:
More below the fold.
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.
The statement about 57,310 books in a number of categories is almost certainly true, as far as it goes. What's missing is an overt acknowledgment that amazon.com has classified certain books (and apparently DVDs) as "adult" and, it seems, limits access to them on that basis. The ham-fistedness here refers to the fact that so many books were inadvertently assigned to the "adult" category and an uproar ensued. Mike Daisey, a former amazon employee acknowledges as much in a blog post yesterday:
Well, more like user error--some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between "adult" and "erotic" and "sexuality". All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get the situation.
The books I've written with my wife don't fall into the GLBT category, so the words "erotic" and "sexuality" are probably what got us into trouble, but I'm not sure how that explains why or how some books on polyamory were flagged, which I'm told they were.
The very existence of this "adult" category is problematic, especially since the filtering system is controlled by amazon; no notice is provided to those included in it; there are no means to appeal a designation, and there are no customer options for overriding the filters.
In addition, as of early this afternoon, Amazon has not completely resolved the existing problem. I did a search under my full name in "Books" and drew a blank. An all Amazon search came up with the Kindle editions of our books and one of our DVDs (the other has been de-ranked.)
Another author has encountered the exact same issue:
http://desayunoencama.livejournal.co...
The explanation also fails to address the fact that some authors noticed de-ranking well before the mass incident this weekend, including Craig Seymour who began having this problem in February:
http://craigspoplife.blogspot.com/...
and Francine Saint Marie who reports struggling with it for more than a year:
I've noticed that rankings have disappeared briefly from our books and DVDs on a couple of occasions since last fall. I even wrote amazon to complain, but by the time I got a response, the ranking had reappeared. The currently unranked DVD lost its ranking sometime within the last two weeks but before this weekend.
There's a lot more going on here than has been disclosed thus far. While amazon has a legal right to conduct business any way it wants, its customers and authors deserve both a comprehensive explanation and an apology.