The publisher in the article pulled all its GLBT titles from the Kindle page and republished them as unmarked romance novels. They immediately started getting sales rankings. This was after spending months trying to get the situation resolved through channels and being stonewalled (¬π) at every turn. It was entirely intentional and the accusation of homophobia is supported by their experience.

Time to do your shopping somewhere else, my friends.

This was, apparently, the concatanation of three separate failures.

First, somebody in France apparently changed the settings such that all books that had the meta-tag “gay and lesbian” were labeled “adult content”, possibly (or possibly not) with the awareness that this would remove them from the sales rankings and from the display by the search engines.

Second– the “glitch”– because of bad coding, a setting done by one person in one place in one country in the world propagated across the world, to the Amazon in America (and elsewhere) not just in France.

Third, and most notably, Amazon had set their “sales rankings” and their search results to censor the stock– the “sales rankings” are not actually the real sales rankings, but are the sales rankings minus the books that Amazon has decided you shouldn’t see. The search results are not actually the search results, but are the books the meet the criteria you search for minus the books that Amazon has decided you shouldn’t see. And they implemented this policy with no notice to their users.

It is, in fact, the last of these failures that annoys me the most, and I’m not mollified by some idiot telling me that it’s just “conservation of moral outrage.” I am no less morally outraged because Amazon tells me “oh, we really hadn’t intended to be censoring just gay and lesbian stuff, we intended to censor ALL KINDS OF STUFF that we didn’t thing you should see.”

Amazon, don’t tell me what I can read.

–
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.geoffreylandis.com

Then, take into account the shfiting nature of Amazon’s indexes. Specific browsenodes can change and drift over time, publishers can change their own terminology, magically creating new browsenodes, and some books get misclassified into the wrong browsenodes if publishers or editors have odd notions of where a target market will look. Each new revision of the API spec comes with a detailed list of stuff that isn’t working this month, too. Heh.

With those factors in mind, we can take a look at the mix of what books were affected — GLBT books, health and sexuality books regardless of orientation, disability sexuality related books, gay AND straight books that belonged to a general ‘erotica’ category… The fact that all of those were grabbed in one fell swoop indicate a bulk update that was too broad on many fronts — not just as it related to the GLBT community.

I want to reiterate that I don’t think this negates concern over Amazon’s general policy of how to handle adult material. And I don’t think that it negates concerns over what does and doesn’t get classified. But a lot of the outrage also focused on disbelief that “dumb mistakes” in routine management of a large dataset could produce the results that everyone saw over Easter. In studying the product categorization system, and in reflecting on my own experiences managing large data warehouses, it’s totally, utterly believable that someone could make that kind of a screwup and not realize the implications until the data has propagated.

There are lots of really important issues at play that this incident brought to the forefront, but they’re getting eclipsed by the “did they/didn’t they mean to” accusations. That’s worrisome to me because this incident has/had the potential to be a different kind of catalyst.

The death of any pet is worth morning, animal or theory.

True, the death of a pet theory deserves time to mourn.

To get a list of all book records in that category using the API, you’d use an ItemSearch function call and provide the integer BrowseNode as an argument, and use the Books index. (Evidently different product types have separate indexes.)

No mention of an ‘adult’ flag, so either that wasn’t exposed in the public API, or the docs are outdated, or they implemented it some other way.

It’s also important to note that the document linked above — all 570 pages of it — is a simple representation of the even more complex systems that they have internally.

People here are throwing around words like ‘tag’ and ‘filter’ and ‘category’ and that’s fine for a cursory back-of-the-napkin explanation of a system you understand. But when you are inventing theories based on your personal feelings of how a ‘filter’ works, and what is possible for a ‘filter,’ it is no different than a creationist explaining that evolution violates the law of thermodynamics. If you aren’t willing to take the time to understand the system that’s being talked about, and you ignore people who have worked with it, do not invent theories about its internal operations.

See my comment to Xopher above.

—-
I don’t know how the Amazon database is structured, but I would bet you can easily navigate from a hierarchical category to all the books that are in that category.

If this the comment you’re referring to? I read it. I have a hard time buying the argument because the category listings that I’ve seen have books as the top hierarchy. Which makes sense because it’s one of the departments/search engine filters. Could you have another top tier hierarchy? Sure but it would be difficult to classify different product categories under a single hierarchy because the standards for what qualifies are very different for each product line.

A wrong, overly expansive list of categories would produce the result seen.

Let’s say for argument’s sake that I agree this was a glitch and nothing more. A filter that got triggered with unintended consequences. In order for that to happen the programming parameters must exist in the first place.

So who created the parameters and what criteria was used for testing? We know it’s overly broad. Yet it’s not even close to wide enough for this filter to be considered an ‘adult’ filter? Not even if say it’s only for books because of so-called sexual content aka ‘the porn’.

Some where along the line the criteria for this filter was approved. It made its way through the testing environment into the production environment. If what I’m hearing is true then all it took was an ‘accidental flip of the switch’ to make it happen.

So please tell me, or better yet have Amazon tell me, how they accidentally created such an overly broad categorization that filters an entire grouping Books > Subjects > Gay & Lesbian with no thought to differentiate between non-fiction vs. fiction yet isn’t nearly broad enough to capture items that and yet doesn’t come close to capturing other ‘adult’ content.

You can call it overly-broad and an honest mistake. I question the fact that a flag or programmed condition like that made it into the production environment at all. Unless it was already part of an official policy. Either that or the procedures in place for testing results against stated criteria are crap. Or the stated criteria was crap. If either of those things are true then what else about Amazon’s IT policies and procedures are crap?

Or there was no pre-existing filter criteria and Amazon got caught implementing a policy to de-rank and de-list specific subject categories to service the needs of an identified portion of its customer base.

Farfetched? Maybe but until we get more detailed answers from Amazon nothing should be off the table. Not even those questions that raise the possibility of censorship.