#Amazonfail
- April 13 2009,
Well, besides having troubles logging into my email account through here, it seems that the online world has gotten very screwy indeed. Amazon.com is claiming a "glitch" has caused it to suppress searches for and the sales rankings of books with LGBT content. At first, Amazon claimed to a few authors (my friend Craig Seymour) that this was being done to books that the company deemed to have "adult" content--never mind the fact that many of these books had no sex at all, just gay characters--then their tune changed and it was a "glitch." That doesn't seem to be the case either, according to the Dear Author site.
While this may not be "censorship" in the purest sense of the word--the actual prevention of publishing by intervention--it is censorship by supression. In many cases, the books affected by the "glitch" no longer appeared anywhere on Amazon's site via search functions. Basically, certain books, for whatever reason, are no longer available on the Internet's largest on-line book store, because somebody didn't like what they had to say. Until Amazon offers an explanation beyond the "glitch," any free-thinking person should avoid the site. This "glitch" may not affect you personally or the types of products you enjoy, but who's to say that the next "glitch" won't. If this isn't fixed soon, I'll be paying money out of my pocket to get the Amazon links of this site post haste.
If you're buying on-line, please buy from:
and as always your local independent bookstore.
UPDATE: Amazon has apologized calling the situation a computer glitch, a cataloging error and "embarrassing and ham-fisted." While the apology is nice, it still doesn't explain why one segment of books was targeted and the company has made no statements as to what they will do to prevent a similar error from happening in the future. As the abolitionist Wendell Phillips said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
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