Some thoughts on #Amazonfail.

Note that there was an attempt at a "family friendly" online bookseller a while back abunga.com. They are now defunct. It didn't succeed at all.

Another issue is that publishers were never told when their books were being deranked. Even if this was a glitch, a publisher should get a note when one of their books is deranked. I'm dismayed that that isn't automatic. This possibly breaks some of Amazon's contractual obligations. Not good behavior at all.

As you may be aware, a 'hacker' (and I use the term very loosely and improperly) has claimed that it was his work, which doesn't entirely exonerate Amazon for the application hole or their failure to figure it out when it apparently started back in February.

I really like what Lars Sjoberg had to say on subjects like these some time ago: "Communication is part of the market."

http://slumbering.lungfish.com/?p=265

Rev, I haven't seen that claim? Do you have a citation for it? I'd be very dubious about such a claim given that more or less anonymous hackers frequently make unsubstantiated claims and also Amazon would have presumably just had to say so if that were the case.

Joshua - Here's the cite: http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html

Ok, first this is only a theory which I have nothing to back it up, but I thought I would put it out anyway. My theory is that someone in the lower ranks at Amazon, who has a certain anti-gay agenda enter a code which would automatically label gay themed books as adult. No one in caught it because they weren't looking for it.

There's finally an official Amazon.com response and apology:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp

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.

It's still not clear if the problem was due to incompetence or malice, but I don't think that really matters - the end effect was the same.

The category metadata is actually supplied by the publisher and it is not user generated. Users can "tag" books but the categorization is what is used, in part, to upsell other books within the same categorization. It appears that the filtering was done on category metadata, an internal issue and not one caused by hackers or unhappy users.

Hi. I just wanted to compliment you for writing such a thoughtful, fair, well-written, thorough, and reasoned response to the Amazon debacle. I mentioned it on Twitter; hope that was ok. Thanks for contributing to the elevation of internet culture. From a gay, philosophical Christian who loves to read.

OmegaMom, that's an obvious troll.

Omegamom, that's interesting but I'm not at all convinced. It doesn't explain why Amazon wouldn't just say so if this had happened.

I still don't get why people care about censoring so-called adult material in the first place. It has all sorts of deleterious effects, but does nothing, as far as I can tell, beneficial.

OK, so to recap:

1) A company with 20,000 employees experiences a communication breakdown in its France division that propagates across its entire network.

2) An online community of LGBT activists and their allies immediately begin to develop conspiracy theories and demand boycotts.

3) Weekend staff at the PR department of the 20,000-employee corporation provide a swift yet inadequate reaction while gathering information.

4) The corporation offers an abject apology and explanation on the first available business day, and has already corrected some of the damage.

5) A tenured philosopher spends 24 hours thinking about all of this and comes to the conclusion that corporations are free to sell whatever they want and consumers are free to shop wherever they want.

6) Said philosopher has yet to issue any clarification of her own intent to boycott said corporation "until I see Amazon take real responsibility for this mess, and for fixing it..."

Satan must be looking for his warm jacket, I agree with neuroconservative!

There *might* have been an issue -- the reasonable thing to do would have been to contact Amazon and give them a couple of days to cope with it all, ferfucksake. But noooo, we had to have BOYCOTT and OUTRAGE and INSULT TO ALL DECENT PEOPLE and on and on and on.

This was bullshit, and the online wannabe lynch mob should be embarrassed.

@ Neuro-conservative

It's certainly not unexpected or abnormal for any community to notice discrepancies that are reflected in their community. Indeed, in the absence of clear information when they attempt to find out what possible explanations there are for this discrepancy, they're going to assume that their community is targeted, because they have no data regarding other communities that may be targeted.

That's not "jumping to conspiracy theories". If an ethnic community finds pejorative commentary written on their front doors, they're going to assume that someone out there is a racist. If the pejorative commentary is written all over various communities, but the only people who know this fact aren't sharing it between those communities, the communication breakdown is causing the misunderstanding, not people jumping to "wild" conclusions.

I don't myself see anything particularly apologetic about Amazon's statement, which doesn't appear to be official. If this was a "Sev-1" incident, going up to senior VP level, fixing the technical problem isn't the half of it, the other half is customer relations (http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166384.asp)... and there really hasn't been much of that.

This incident raises a lot of questions about Amazon's data policy. How is their data structure designed, that a single person can cause this sort of error? Why is there not a check in place to notice major differences between listings, triggering an alert? Anyone who has touched a book on relational databases or run one in production knows that you absolutely need rollback capability. If they didn't have this capability designed, what other egregious errors do they have in their data structures, IT infrastructure, and business processes? What have they done to ensure this doesn't happen again? If something like this does happen, how is it that a major business problem (apparently one in the most severe category they have) results in no effective communication from the company?

Do I think this was a major attempt to blacklist LGBT literature? No, not really. It's possible but unlikely - the evolution of the disclosure (lots of people noticing a major change in a short period of time) leads me to believe that a technical error is a much more likely explanation.

Do I think it shows that Amazon has made a few real stinkers in their system design? Oh, ja. Am I now less inclined to rely upon them as a vendor? You betcha. Have they said or done anything since the story broke to provide me with any sort of confidence? Nope, not yet.

I think that anyone who expects an instant and correct answer from a enormously complex corporation on a major public holiday needs to stop smoking crack and go back on their ADD medication.

Maybe Amazon knows the problem. Maybe they're still trying to trace it through byzantine computer AI simulation. Maybe the people in charge decided to turn off their phones during their kids' Easter egg hunts. But expecting an instant answer to a complex problem is completely unrealistic. And expecting them to say something before they have a chance to check their facts is immature.

Patrick: I disagree. Assuming malicious agents for something that has a plausible explanation in terms of error *is* jumping to conspiracy theories. I find it surprising that you even now describe the error explanation as merely "plausible" and are looking for other reasons to criticize Amazon.com in a "moving goalposts" maneuver. I agree with Lab Lemming--as someone who has worked behind the scenes dealing with various kinds of glitches at very large corporations, it can easily take a few days to get a full explanation and help a corporate communications team produce a comprehensive response. Amazon.com has already admitted that this error was "embarrassing and ham-fisted" and taken responsibility for it.

The hacker's code doesn't even work.

Honestly, at the end of the day, I could care less about the "cause" of the #amazonfail incident, be it technical, user-driven, or a rogue employee. My ultimate concern, and, I believe, that of the author of this post, is that Amazon has any sort of "censorship" in place, at all, especially for literature and other art forms. Avoiding offense of others' sensibilities is not a valid excuse, I'm sorry, but that's just how I feel about it. Censorship, in any form, has no place in a free society. If that makes you uncomfortable, then, perhaps, you're too immature to live in one.

I do not understand how a technical error that began in February is not discovered, and that correspondence is given to authors stating "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists." is given in response to an inquiry regarding a young adult novel without anybody wondering what's wrong with the picture. I think the de-ranking was policy, but I don't think they realized the broad effects it would have on their cataloging.

"Please be advised that we are aware of the current issue with Amazon's ranking system. We are working to gather more information regarding the issue and will issue a statement as soon as we have all the information and a solution."

A nice standard statement like that from Amazon would surely put a lot of people at ease. Most people don't expect an immediate answer (@Lab Lemming) they simply want to know a company is aware of the issue and will give them more information when they have it. It all goes back to the need for transparency in operations.

Benefit of the doubt

I am a longtime Amazon customer. I love their ease of use, have spent hundreds of dollars there, and am strongly predisposed to keep using them. We even have a Kindle for gosh sakes.

However, in my time I've seen a lot of controversies with Amazon. The one-click patent, the print-on-demand kerfluffle, the issue authors originally had with putting used books and new books on the same page, and probably more that I have forgotten. And now we have strong evidence that Amazon is filtering results of their searches without an opt-in/opt-out mechanism, or any transparency. I don't need a nanny when I search for books.

After a while, the benefit of the doubt argument starts wearing a little thin. Yes, Amazon is a publicly held company that is supposed to make money, but just as they are entitled to run their company as they see fit, I am entitled to spend my money as I see fit.

As my friend Sam Starbuck observed, "If you shenanigan the internet, the internet will generally shoot you in the face." And Amazon just got both barrels right in the nostrils.

It has also been observed, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." That appears to apply here. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with Patrick insofar as this reduces my trust in Amazon; they clearly have a fault in their programming that allowed this disaster to occur, and that doesn't inspire confidence, over and above the PR fallout.

I have been a regular customer, but am now waiting for a word from Amazon to tell me they are not censoring books. We do not need to go back to the Middle Ages when books that did not follow the narrow minded ideas of the times were burned on the public square.

First, I'd like to just compliment this blogger for such a well-rounded article that looks at a lot of the issues and isn't making any sweeping general statements. Thank you.

Second, a point that I think has been overlooked is that it didn't happen all at once on Sunday. It started in February, and authors were apparently getting letters from Amazon customer service personnel saying that their work was falling into the adult category under "new policy." Then someone else says that there was no "new policy." Could these letters have been automatic and a result of the "glitch?" Possibly. But whomever is responsible, for whatever reason, anti-gay agenda or not, I agree with Patrick that Amazon needs to seriously look at their data systems and make some adjustments. This kind of thing shouldn't happen to ANY category of book, adult or otherwise. I'm sure if it was happening to Christian inspirational literature, or African American literature, that the internet would be full of the same kind of outrage.

But look at the timeline of events, and things start to look less than noble for Amazon.

Very good post - I'll link and spread this. I'm completely on the same page with you here, and I'm taking my business elsewhere. Have already deleted my pre-orders, wanted to give Amazon a chance to rectify/apologize. I'll walk into a bricks-and-mortar store tomorrow and I'll thank them for not being Amazon. That should lift some spirits. :)

The best argument from both angles I've read yet on this mess. In my opinion, I have to agree that whatever the cause of this, Amazon must bear the brunt of the blame and suffer the consequences. I've tried to stay above the fray and not jump automatically to the deliberate censorship conclusion, but regardless, Amazon's slow response, and, more importantly, their multiple explanations that contradict one another, are insulting enough to my intelligence that I'll take my business elsewhere, possibly permanently.

Finally I get to a blog that isn't intent on shredding Amazon - most everything that's been posted here I have to agree on, since, and to repeat myself, again, I just repost one of my last replies here.

I for one can get ANY GLBT book I want on Amazon.com on any page with or without ranking, by simply putting in author or title and forget about any âkeywordsâ or labels and tags, thatâs just too complex and their system might come up with rubbish â so whatâs the problem here again? Author > title, voila. Simple. And in case you get an anti-gay book first, well, then that's obviously down to bigger sales - no matter how sad it would be. Amazon have NO anti-gay 'policies' and then simply tweak the numbers. They wanna 'sell' - ANYTHING, not deprive a certain group of finding their GLBT books suddenly.

And why on Earth should these books ânotâ be categorised as âadultâ? THEY ARE, get real - Anything with even the slightest sex content gay or otherwise IS ADULT and has nothing to do with âcensorshipâ, but the majority of customers NOT buying them and have to be classified somehow and therefore donât appear front page. Why should they be exempt suddenly? Why do you think to warrant ratings exemption and be included in âmainstreamâ publications, when itâs NOT mainstream? Sex in the eye of the âpublic majorityâ IS ADULT and the GLBT scene is even smaller than any other âromanticâ genre classified as âadultâ just the same, in contrast to any other customer community and these books arenât invisible suddenly. I havenât seen any of them having âdisappearedâ. None whatsoever. Author > title, voila. Simple.

And why so adamant on rejecting their âapologiesâ or possible tech issues explanations? Amazon would be really daft to have done this âdeliberatelyâ and discriminate against the GLBT community suddenly. Even as âexperiment' just to see how people react. Look at the fierce backlash of the other âalarmistâ blogs it caused alone for ONE blog starting all this, and at STILL no real proof many simply buy as fact.

All this great effort to âexposeâ Amazonâs âdirty tricksâ is very important, and I boycott anything possible anti-gay or lesbian this and that, but as long as Amazon havenât actually been âprovenâ of having âremovedâ or de-ranked any of them, Iâm not going to include them on my boycott list. Show me proof - and THEN Iâll block them.

@ Lab Lemming

> I think that anyone who expects an instant and
> correct answer from a enormously complex
> corporation on a major public holiday needs
> to stop smoking crack and go back on their
> ADD medication.

I do not expect instant and correct. I expect either instant and appropriate, or correct and detailed. Amazon has, thus far, provided neither.

My analysis has nothing whatsoever to do with this particular incident; it is merely an expressed symptom of an underlying disorder. A single employee should not be able to make this sort of error without an error-checking mechanism in place. That error-checking mechanism should not permit large scale changes in production values without prior notification. This is basic IT systems design. A major corporate "disaster incident" should have a clear cut communications plan. If a "sev-1" incident occurs, there should at the very least be existing communications boilerplate available that can easily be adapted. This is standard business 101 continuity planning.

@ Jim

> Patrick: I disagree. Assuming malicious agents
> for something that has a plausible explanation
> in terms of error *is* jumping to conspiracy
> theories.

The problem, Jim, is that there is always a plausible explanation in terms of error. The lack of communication in this place prevented those people who noticed the discrepancy from learning full context. I'm not saying that the LGBT, as a whole, didn't over-react (I'm not following this story fully), I'm saying Amazon under-reacted, which led to a communications environment where conspiracy theories can grow out of control.

Again, if a LGBT author writes an amazon customer service representative with a query about their delisting receives a reasonable explanation, they're not going to turn around and post something to their twitter account that will be picked up by other LGBT authors, who will provide confirming anecdotes that they are having similar problems.

If there is a ready list of recently delisted books that can be referenced by customer service representatives, the representative would easily and quickly know that something is terribly wrong, and be able to communicate that bidirectionally -> "I'm sorry, sir, but there seems to be an abnormally large number of delistings between yesterday and today, which indicates a problem with our listings database. I will pass this along to my supervisor immediately."

> I find it surprising that you even now
> describe the error explanation as merely
> "plausible"

That is not what I said. I said neither "merely" nor "plausible". I said: "Do I think this was a major attempt to blacklist LGBT literature? No, not really. It's possible but unlikely" I think you're assuming that I'm one of those conspiracy theorists out of hand.

> and are looking for other reasons to
> criticize Amazon.com in a "moving
> goalposts" maneuver.

My dear sir, I move no goalposts. The LGBT community can criticize Amazon for whatever reasons they so desire; their criticisms are not mine. My criticisms are entirely based upon three factors, all technical- or business-process related:

* A problem like this (a single employee making an error of this magnitude) should be properly accounted for in systems design - it should be very hard for this to happen in the first place. Your Internet presence indicates you're a security guy; the principle of least privilege applies here.

* Since, in any complex system design, you cannot prevent all error, you should have proper checks and auditing in place to ensure that when an error of this magnitude occurs, the people that notice the error are *internal to the organization* - the customer should NEVER notice this first. Please don't re-feed me the "Holiday Weekend" line; if you don't plan on having people on-call at a company that relies on an international and online presence, you have problems. If you're constrained from having an adequate response during those times, then you certainly should go back to the previous observation and forbid systems-wide changes during an appropriate window of time.

* When all else fails, and the customer does notice an error of this magnitude before someone internal to the organization, an effective communications mechanism should already exist. By definition, you're in a crisis... every twittery second you delay in communicating with your customer base is making the problem worse. Amazon should know this.

> Amazon.com has already admitted that this
> error was "embarrassing and ham-fisted"
> and taken responsibility for it.

No, they haven't. Communications from the company indicating that this is the case have been published; those aren't official company disclosures.

Look, there are still plenty of reasons to buy from Amazon. I'm probably going to buy my next round of books from there anyway, regardless of a single incident like this one.

But to pretend that this doesn't represent several layers of failure in the Amazon organization is just crazy. If Amazon internal meetings are *not* buzzing with agenda items that look just like my three points above, I'll eat my sysadmin hat.

This is the best post I've read on this entire debacle yet. Thank you.

I would like to add that any organisation that makes changes to its IT systems either just before or during a major public holiday does not not have the right to to use the excuse of lack of staff over said public holiday for its failure to address the failings of the changes promptly.

Either you make sure you have the staff and procedures in place to role back if needed, else you do not go ahead with the changes. Anything else is simple imcompetence.

I would also ask, where are the disclaimers in best seller lists ? If Amazon where being honest they would make it clear that the best seller lists only contain items they, using criteria they refuse to divulge, have deemed suitable for all ages.

I think what I am saying is that it is possible Amazon have been both malevalent and incompetent here. One does not preclude the other after all!

To finalise my own thoughts on this particular blog over this issue, all Amazon is interested in is to sell - anything, until the public actually forces them to remove certain items (like the Nazi t-shirts some time ago). So they'd be pretty dumb to remove or de-rank a certain very popular if not major category of books deliberately just because something went wrong down the ranking line for some or were 'missing' as some stated, since this didn't affect GBLT books only, let's not forget that fact. As I said, when I looked on coming across this issue, they were all there.

But anyway, I'm done with this for now and will return to my own gay fiction writing, which I would also self-publish at any rate, and don't really 'need' Amazon for that. Give them time to sort out their mess - Gods know what reallty happened, and I for one won't boycott them until it's been proven they did this on purpose. Which I doubt. Take care everyone and happy reading/writing.

This post, and Pat Cahalan comment, are great. Really clear and thoughtful, much appreciated.

I just wanted to say, wonderful points, everyone.

And would like to point out, one question is if this was an attempted "hack" job, then why wouldn't Amazon just say so?

Two reasons (among many) would be if it was admittedly a hacker exploiting the system, this empowers the hacker as usually they only run on gall, arrogance and ego.

Second, I think the anonymous poster provides an excellent example of why not admit it (yet). If they admit it was a weakness in the system BEFORE they are sure the weakness is fixed, there are tons of people who will continually try to use the exploit while they are fixing the system. As the system is being fixed, the exploit would also evolve and resolution would become much more difficult.
(I am also using the term hacker very loosely)

Yes, even if they don't admit it was a hacker, there are people who would "know" it was a hacker, or try to find out, and then attempt to exploit the issue. But obviously, without the public acknowledgment by Amazon, these numbers will be much less.

I am not by any means saying this is the reason for anything, or what has happened. Just wanted to give common practices for that type of situation.

'I think what I am saying is that it is possible Amazon have been both malevalent and incompetent here. One does not preclude the other after all!'

I back Matt's statement 100%. It seems from what Amazon has admitted (French employee made a mistake?), someone unqualified to write code was reclassifying books. This doesn't thrill me as a consumer. The minimum I would expect from the business I give my personal credit card number to so I can buy GBLT books is adequate staff in IT, supervision during any data modification, appropriately timed project execution on the work calendar, and system checks as the implementation proceeds.

Amazon does not need sympathizers on this matter.

It has been more than 30 hours since Janet has posted her boycott threat, and still no update addressing the newest developments. I am OUTRAGED at this conspiracy of silence! It is not acceptable, and not explainable, that a blogger on academic sabbatical should be so delinquent! This kind of behavior has *no place* in a free society!

And why on Earth should these books ânotâ be categorised as âadultâ? THEY ARE, get real - Anything with even the slightest sex content gay or otherwise IS ADULT

Heather has two Mommies is a kids book. There's no sex in it whatsoever. It was deranked anyway.

Playboy centerfolds? (Hetero) porn stars' memoirs? Still ranked.

I call foul.

Do I think that this was intentional on Amazon's part? No. But given the assumptions it exposes, I'm not surprised that a lot of people feel less comfortable with the company than they did before.

@DeMoy: You're an idiot.
Heather Has Two Mommies has no sex or sexual content of any sort whatsoever in it.

It is a children's book. If the fact that a child character has two parents is sufficient to make a book "adult", well, there are very very few non-adult books.

I haven't read any of the other delisted books (as far as I know, anyway, not having followed this in detail), but I'm quite sure that several of them are no more "adult" than the mainstream - except that they have people of a different sexual orientation than the "mainstream" books do.

@ Neo-conservative, the analogy your angling for is like comparing a bowling alley to a lawyer, and it fails in principle because you're not comparing similar things. An online blogger isn't the same as an international company for profit.

People have the right to ask questions on this issue, even if they didn't agree with your impression of the situation. People can be angry at things that don't anger you. Your way -- or anyone's ways - isn't the one true way. But people can use their words to ask question, if they like.

You may be interested in Clay Shirky's take on this.

Sorry for sucking you in, but very glad I did! Nice post.

Um, hello @Michael Ralston â thanks for calling me an 'idiot', just for probably saying that anything with sex (in fiction) gay or otherwise is usually rated 'adult'. AGAIN, READ IT PROPERLY! (And if you mean my second post, your insult directed at me in that case eludes me completely, since all it says is that all Amazon wanna do is sell, anything, and that I doubt they targeted GLBT books deliberately. So just to say Iâm an idiot doesnât even actually hint on âwhyâ you think so and therefore has not the slightest merit.) However, just to defend myself, I said that sex contents of any kind is rated adult as a reflection of the PUBLIC MAJORITY who see it like that, and if thereâre a few missing that should be labelled adult for sex or other contents like violence but havenât, thatâs up to the seller most of all following various sources to determine that.

No matter I myself am against any âtagsâ per se, books or otherwise â But that sadly doesnât work in real life, and all books for one simply need to be labelled and categorised somehow, or they can't sell their stuff, adult labelling or not is up to THEM, apart from the fact that sometimes even the Statesâ legislative dictate them to up it to âadultâ content since Amazon is american, in case you forgot, and theyâre pretty conservative in many ways just because, again, the public majority cried wolf for them to act and demand another âadultâ label â FACT. I for one donât care about any labels or ranking and buy what I want â recommended or not. But some think this is important (as writer or customer) and many readers simply need some sort of rating or tag to find them if they donât know the author/title, and has nothing to do with âcensorshipâ in my eyes (as some stated on other blogs). Fine, their right to think so.

But just because it's GLBT literature, many think it should be excluded, or at least not made an example of, since it might smell of discrimination when it's rated adult âsuddenlyâ. I can see their point, but personally think thatâs paranoia and wouldnât regard it like that at all, thinking theyâd targeted my work suddenly (or try to make it invisible) just because it says âadultâ on my listing suddenly, since people who want it, will find it. In fact, this apparent de-ranking or removal of certain categories didnât only hit GLBT books alone, letâs not forget that â (And most of all watch your words here, @Michael Ralston.) At least @Kit Russell only quoted me, though why eludes me, since I never mentioned 'Heather has two Mommies' at all, or that it contains adult material. (In case that was directed at me as well with your so charming demeanour not having made that clear in fact by yourself @Michael Ralston.) But if you only wanna insult other bloggers (@Michael Ralston) not even having followed this issue from the start, (!) OR in fact read any of these âotherâ books to your own words, (!) just go somewhere else and insult more people who don't conform to your very aggressive tone who actually HAVE read them. Or even wrote them.

At least @John was nice to all and said: âI just wanted to say, wonderful points, everyoneâ. But that was before you (@Michael Ralston) joined in to throw insults. And what the actual issue here is in fact, (in case you never noticed (@Michael Ralston) is that many believe that Amazon did this on purpose, while I still donât until proven âguiltyâ, since we still donât have any real âproofâ, and even their apologies or explanations so far have been rejected. Up to them, or to think it was more subversive than it might have been. But I for one wonât just simply follow their partly ignorant overreactions if understandable discontent, thinking they were targeted as a minority (triggered by one blogger, who in fact said he does NOT think it was malicious intent and nothing had been proven at that point at all either) only behaving in fact just like those they oppose thinking them anti-gay, or those who didnât agree with them that it was done deliberately, barely allowing any room for errors on the part of Amazon.

Which in fact is just as shortsighted and ignorant as those thinking GLBT folks are 'sick', (when in fact they actually are to think that way in my view, but is still their ârightâ to do so). Unfortunately the community, in my eyes, simply took this issues as given fact, since apparently some books were missing or had been de-ranked suddenly â while when I joined they were all âbackâ and therefore couldnât agree on that part, anymore. But what I find sad is the fact that ever since then this entire mess blew out of proportions left right and centre, instead of keeping cool and stick together and went into simply accusing each other suddenly for differing opinions and ended in outright refusal of possible reasons given by Amazon as to why this happened. But thatâs just me, the âidiotâ. :-))