This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Amazon, bookselling, censorship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Dear Jeff,
I don’t know if you use Twitter, but you might be aware of something called #amazonfail, currently the most talked-about topic among the network of 5m+ users. This is an online expression of dismay at Amazon’s new and apparently discriminatory censorship policy.
If the version circulating on the Internet is correct, your new policy of excluding ‘adult’ material from Amazon searches by removing their sales ranking runs as follows:
“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.”
The idea of protecting us from ‘adult’ material seems unnecessary, when your own Conditions of Use (USA / UK) restrict Amazon purchases to adults. But my concern - and that of the many people tweeting with the #amazonfail tag - is how you define ‘adult material’.
In my country, a few years before you were born, a book was published following a notorious obscenity trial. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor asked if it was the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read”. Publication went ahead, 32 years after the book was written, and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” has since become regarded as a classic work of English literature.
Overnight, you appear to have overturned that hard-won decision and reclassified it as filth that we should be protected from.
Worse still, D.H. Lawrence notwithstanding, your definition of ‘adult material’ appears mainly to apply to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender books. Non-explicit LGBT literature, history and biography is censored, while explicit hetero books are not. No longer can we find Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges are not the Only Fruit” or Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” by sales rank. But we may still find “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds” and Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls”, a graphic novel in every sense. Even our National Treasure, Stephen Fry, appears to have had his autobiography de-ranked, while it it all too easy to find Jackie Collins.
You can see many more examples of this curious inconsistency listed on the online petition that many of us are currently signing, and on this handy list.
This looks very much like blatant homophobia. Would you care to share your selection criteria with us? Or have you simply gone through your Gay & Lesbian section with a red pen?
This approach to what is deemed obscene and what is not takes publishing on a backward step that makes you seem as out of touch with modern social norms as Mervyn Griffith-Jones. As Kassia Krozier points out, we can freely find “Mein Kampf”, books on training fighting dogs, and other offensive material. But the works of E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence appear not to be the kind of books you would wish us to read.
Well, you have your wish. We will not buy them - from Amazon at least. As well as signing the online petition, joining the Facebook Group and redefining “Amazon rank“, we shall boycott Amazon until this policy is reversed. Other online retailers are available, other highstreet chains - maybe we shall even support our local independent bookshop.
I hope this is a mistake that will be quickly corrected, and not a conscious policy of discrimination. I look forward to a public response to the many blog posts and tweets on the subject that have been written this weekend.
Jon Reed, Publishing Talk
Related posts:
- Kasia Krozier: Open Letter to Amazon Regarding Recent Policy Changes
- Mark R. Probst: Amazon Follies
- SmartBitches: Amazon Rank [how to Googlebomb]
- Edward Champion: Amazonfail: A Call to Boycott Amazon
- news-journalonline.com: AmazonFail: A Twitter Movement in Action
- Jezebel: Why is Amazon Removing the Sales Ranks from Gay, Lesbian Books?
- Mashable: Amazon Accused of Removing Gay Books from Rankings
- Dear Author: Amazon Censors Its Rankings & Search Results to Protect Us Against GLBT Books
- LA Times: Amazon de-ranks so-called adult books, including National Book Award winner
- Booklorn: Amazon accused of manipulating site content (again): Searches and rankings this time
- The Purple Patch: Amazonfail: epic corporate fail day is Easter, apparently
- net.effect: #Amazonfail and the politics of anti-corporate cyberactivism
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Last 3 posts by Jon Reed
- 10 tips for organizing a tweetup - December 24th, 2009
- Tools of Change at Frankfurt Book Fair - October 14th, 2009
- social media workshops for publishers - September 2nd, 2009
Cialis angioplasty
April 13th, 2009 at 12:22 am
[...] Publishing Talk: an open letter to Jeff Bezos [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Hear hear! Indeed there are many used bookstores that I’ve been meaning to check out.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:20 am
[...] out Jezebel’s take and the open letter to Jeff Bezos at Publishing Talk. And in case there’s any doubt as to how quickly this is spreading, here: #amazonfail on [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 1:23 am
Very well said. I hope that Bezos reads it. This is such an unbelievable situation!
April 13th, 2009 at 2:22 am
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I hope he does read it. It’s a shame too, because, you would think a bookseller, even a large corporation such as this, would welcome any and all books to be sold via its company. You would hope at the very least that they LOVE books as much as their customers.
Amazon has to be aware that alienating an entire community of people, not just gay and lesbian, but bisexual, transgender, any and all queer folk, and those who are friends and family of anyone from the LGBTQ community, is a bad, bad move on their part. In the end, its only hurting them.
By taking popular, award-winning books out of their ranks, they are forcing those of us seeking out these specific genres and books to look elsewhere (I prefer my local bookstores, truth be told).
It would seem that Amazon.com has become nothing more than the Walmart of bookselling.
How sad.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Thanks for not only speaking out but bringing this to the attention of others. Well said!
April 13th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Thanks to all for their outrage over this matter. My book is mainstream romance with an erotic element. For those of you familiar with the genre, it is very tame (almost vanilla) compared to some I have read. I can no longer find my book in a search from the main page nor do I have a rating.
Many of my friends and colleagues have been affected by this insanity.
I call it insanity because most of our books are available elsewhere and if they can’t be found at Amazon, customers will simply start using the sites that do cater to them. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting where some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to alienate thousands of authors and their readers!
April 13th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
[...] here is an “Open Letter to Jeff Bezos”, which also addresses the larger issue of censorship, from Publishing Talk’s John Reed. Some [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
[...] also this interesting “open letter” to Jeff Bezos with lots of links to other open letters and various articles. Let me just say that while this is at [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
[...] enough here, here, here, here, here, and here, new definitions of Amazon Rank, and calls to arms here, here, here, and [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 1:20 am
[...] People wrote letters to Amazon. [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
[...] mentre riviste come Playboy sono state lasciate ai loro posti, come riportato nella lettera di Jon Reed. Questo problema ha creato scompiglio non solo negli Stati Uniti ma a livello globale rimuovendo i [...]
July 26th, 2009 at 10:44 am
[...] An open letter to Jeff Bezos [...]