Amazon.com delists books on homosexuality

Apr 12, 2009 21:08

Time to boycott Amazon.com . They've decided to delist factual and useful books on homosexuality from their internal search engine, calling them "adult themed," so that "ex-gay" books show up on searches before other books on homosexuality. For example, the book "Heather Has Two Mommies" does exist on Amazon.com in both the original edition and the 10th anniversary edition, however it does not show up when you search all of Amazon on the title and only the 10th anniversary edition shows when you search on the title under Books only. You also will not find the book's sales rank anywhere on either edition's page (do a Find on the page for "rank" or "sales rank"), as opposed to on the page for another random book.

More details and about what's going on, including an explanation of how the sales rank is being misrepresented or deleted entirely, are on rosefox's blog linky linky here. And just to clarify, Amazon does say it is their own choice to filter on "adult themes", not the choice of some database they are buying into.

Edit: I have submitted the following letter (identifying information redacted) to Amazon.com's Customer Service online, and will be looking up their mailing address and sending another copy on school stationary. Feel free to copy or modify for your own letter.

I recently heard about Amazon's policy to derank books on homosexuality and remove them from the search results. I am very disappointed in this policy and will no longer be purchasing from Amazon, unless this policy is revoked. In addition, my influence extends beyond my own dollar, as I am informing my friends and family of this new hateful policy.

I am also a faculty at a community college (subject, school, and location redacted). Every year I have hundreds of students, and in the past I have recommend that they can purchase their textbooks for cheaper than the college bookstore by buying them on Amazon.com. Some of the goals of a college education is for students to broaden their horizons, and to learn to see the world from different points of view. In order to achieve this goal, we must all have access to as much information as possible. Amazon's policy to selectively blacklist certain topics that one portion of the population finds offensive is in direct opposition to the goals of a college education. Therefore I cannot in good conscience recommend Amazon to my college students as a source for textbooks. Until Amazon changes this policy, I will no longer be recommending Amazon to my students but instead will recommend competitors BN.com and Powells.com .

Edit: According to Publisher's Weekly, Amazon is backpedaling and claiming it's all just a glitch, but they do not appear to be making any efforts to fix said glitch. Searching on Heather Has Two Mommies still doesn't turn up the book, the book itself still has no rank listed, and a site-wide search on "homosexuality" still turns up ex-gay propaganda bullshit. I also haven't seen anything about Amazon's comment elsewhere - like on Amazon. I'll start listening to Amazon's comments when they start actually doing something about them.

Edit: Amazon is emailing everyone who emailed them to say it's an error.

From Amazon:

Amazon.com Customer Service to me
2:05 AM (4 hours ago)

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us. We recently discovered a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed.

Thanks again for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

If yes, click here:

If not, click here:

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,

Mehul Damera
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
[link removed, I don't want to give them traffic right now]

I clicked on "No, it's not resolved" and wrote:

Sending an email to say "we're working on fixing this problem" without providing any evidence of said work is frustrating. I hope that I am informed when this is actually fixed, because it is not fixed as of yet and I still intend to boycott Amazon until it is.

Also, you have lost a lot of reputation from this supposed glitch. I do not see how this could be just a glitch, and I feel that you simply are not owning up to a deliberate bias that turned out to cost the company money, so instead you're pretending it never happened. Fess up, get a press release out, and spend a week featuring books on homosexuality on the front page: that would build good will in the LGBT/ally community and show that it really was in error.

amazonfail, books, academia, homosexuality, activism, gay rights

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