I've been tracking this all weekend, but waited for this morning to say anything, because I kept hoping against hope that Amazon would stand up, say, "Sorry, this was a massive error on our part, and we should have fixed it months ago when it first came to our attention," rather than blaming things on a clearly fictional "glitch."
For those who have been blissfully out of the loop, this past weekend it became clear that Amazon had created a discriminatory policy which took away sales ranking from titles which had been determined to be "adult" material. This matters because once ranking is gone it's impossible to see how well a book is selling, it doesn't show up on Amazon's lists of best sellers, and it becomes a lot harder to search for the book on their site, even if you know author name and title.
While this might be problematic in and of itself, the real issue is which items were classified as "adult".
Books containing LGBT characters or ideas seem to have been hit especially hard. Even classic titles like Rubyfruit Jungle and Odd Girl Out, or nonfiction titles like My Gender Workbook were classified as "adult". Among the titles hit by this practice were Full Frontal Feminism and Yes Means Yes, both feminist non-fiction titles that could hardly be called "adult." Even Heather Has Two Mommies, a children's picture book which has been banned in may school districts for showing a positive portrayal of a lesbian couple raising a daughter, is apparently now an "adult" book. Even more upsettingly, clearly pornographic titles from publishers like Playboy remained ranked and not designated as "adult." Read a good list of which books were affected.
Amazon claims that this is the result of a "glitch." Here is the full text of the email they sent us in response to our concerns:
"Thanks very much for your voice mail. There was a glitch with our sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible. Thanks for checking in."
Unfortunately for Amazon's damage-control department, the evidence clearly shows that this was not a sudden glitch. For one thing, it has been happening since February, and was brought to their attention months ago. For another, an Amazon representative told one of the de-ranked authors that this was part of Amazon company policy.
Although there are theories going around that perhaps this was the result of an organized effort of malicious flagging by some outside group, Amazon does not have an easy way for items to be flagged as adult. The customer tagging system could only affect ranking if Amazon automatically de-ranked anything tagged as "adult" without any human oversight. If this had been their policy, then they would have realized that it was having problematic and unintended consequences when authors first began complaining back in February.
Until and unless this issue is satisfactorily addressed, in a way that deals with the reality of the situation, rather than simply claiming a no-fault "glitch" did it all, we will be linking any books that we review or mention to their Powell's Books webpage, rather than Amazon. There is also an online petition from care.org addressing the bias against LGBT books.
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