The best thing about #amazonfail is that I have picked up so many new blogs and communities, about ten-fifteen twitter followers (not sure which were just random spam), and an amazing to-read list of books. The newest blog I've picked up has also provided the best explanation for #amazonfail that I've yet heard, though it is in no way substantiated.

Sexerati says:

I spoke to an anomyous coder inside Amazon. That coder revealed that someone at Amazon — a real person — was responsible for tagging 58,000 titles as “adult” — not a hacker, and very likely not a “glitch,” either:

anoncoder: I can’t find the actual actual root cause, but it looks like someone internally changed 58K asins to be adult - whether that was accidental or intentional I couldn’t say, but we’re rolling it back.

The whole post is worth a read, and while it still doesn't explain the letters sent to authors or the stone-cold silence, it at least makes real sense.  The hacker theories don't, for many reasons which are splatted all over the #amazonfail tag on twitter.  What I am increasingly afraid of, however, is that this is a combination of many things.  Amazon.com has a long history of subtle but aggressive practices regarding sales; their goal is very plainly to be a complete and total monopoly of bookselling of all kinds, and they've positioned themselves as close to that reality as they can manage.  The problem is that this episode proves (as have smaller ones) that Amazon.com is no benevolent overlord.  They've been given too much power, and it may already be too late to take it back.

I plan to make all my book purchases elsewhere from now on.  I will not be buying a Kindle, no matter what.  I can't, even if they fix everything tomorrow.  Amazon.com hit me personally, and they have made it clear they aren't interested in apologizing; anything at this point is going to feel like they did it because they had to.  If they demonstrate for an extended period of time that they have new policies free of censorship or dictatorship, I might possibly change my mind, but I don't see this coming.  I haven't yet decided how I feel about buying videos from them, or music, but I suspect my distaste will be too great for anything for awhile, no matter what.  Certainly I won't be making any purchases until the delisting is fully rectified--and I do mean fully, not just the high-profile books they've fumbled to restore now.  

I don't expect any of my friends of family to follow suit with me, though I'll ask you not to purchase anything from amazon.com for me for some time to come.  I will, however, ask you this: what would you like to be certain is never censored?  Books?  Music?  Movies?  A genre?  What assurance do you have that you won't find the say when you, too, have been amazon ranked--and will you find that you have any alternative.  If you can answer that for yourself or simply feel you can still trust amazon.com, that is your decision.  For now, I'm sticking to my decision to leave amazon.com entirely, and if they don't resolve this in the next day or so, I'll be deleting my account and making that a permanent break.


UPDATE: Seattlepi has a new update from Amazon.com with an actual statement.  Here it is in full:

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.

Nice start.  Keep going.

Today ought to be an interesting day: first I want to see if amazon.com responds at all to the twitterstorm that erupted within the past 24 hours. A nice recap (and warning to anyone considering pissing off consumers in the internet age) is here, but the really interesting stuff comes from Dear Author. They analyze the metadata which allowed the "glitch," and they question how, excatly, this could happen. They also add:

Thus, as a “glitch” it was a remarkably targeted one that seems to support the emails that Mark Probst and Craig Seymour received from Amazon which was gay and lesbian works were deemed “adult” content regardless of actual content. This evidence appears to indicate that it isn’t so much a glitch but a specific policy. The question is then who implemented the policy of marking GLBT books as adult and who knew of the implementation? What kind of supervisory person signed off on it?

Alternatively, you could argue that it was a lazy programmer that decided to filter out all adult content and included GLBT for the heck of it but that doesn’t really address the emails to Probst and Seymour. You could also argue that it was a hacker that went in over the past week and inserted an algorithm that filtered out GLBT/erotic/sex content. Obviously, why the filter was implemented in such a way is a question only Amazon can answer.

I'd also like to point out that this is why newspapers are having a hard time: Check this news search for "amazon." Props to Seattle Post Intelligencer for actually covering the story, but as of right now, mostly what I see is careful, incomplete work (AP) and people bemused by twitter. This is news. This is news we wanted, so we got it from each other. Blogs had it. Twitter had links, and corrections, and updates. The AP had reserve. Maybe if they stopped suing people for using their stuff and actually did news, they'd be relevant.

Queerty has a nice sum-up:

The Inquistor mentions that at least one author was told that the decision was based on policy, not technical error. Even if it's not, even if, beyond all plausible reality, Amazon's software just randomly decided to mark a wide swath of gay literature as "adult", including the children's book Heather Has Two Mommies, the fallout for the company is likely to be intense.

On Twitter, the rage towards the company continues unabated. It's the number two topic (only outstripped by talk about the Mikeyy worm hitting PC's) and users have already organized a full-on boycott,reaching over 9,000 signatures so far. The speed at which Twitter was able to take a single blog post by author Craig Seymour and transform it into a national news story shows just how much power the service has in collectively organizing direct political action. And of course, YouTube is now getting in on the act, as you can see from this entertaining call made about the Twilight book series: