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On Amazon Fail
There has been a great deal of discussion about the delisting of a slew of books on Amazon over the weekend. The gist of it seemed to be that some glitch had caused a whole lotta books to lose sales rankings, and all sorts of indexing features which made it more likely for them to be sold.
I was prone to thinking it was just that, a glitch of some sort.
Then I saw this: Amazon’s "Glitch" Myth Debunked
The writer spent a year being frustrated that her book wasn't indexing properly. She was told various things about the inability of the system to manualy add the data.
Keeping in mind now that writers and other creative types can sometimes be tragically conceited and self-fixated, my view of the "big picture" was still clouded by the firm belief that I was, for some reason, being singled out by Amazon. Realize, too, that at no point did they ever fess up to me that they had an anti-queer agenda. Thus, it did not occur to Team Saint Marie to "refine" our routine and random searches of their browse tree until the very last quarter of 2008, at which point we had such an epiphany and began feverishly cross-referencing popular gay and lesbian paperback titles with their alternate Kindle editions, discovering that those, too, had no sales rankings in the Kindle store.
In the first quarter of 2009, we undertook to publicize these startling findings on Amazon, both in the Kindle publishers’ forum and in various customer discussion threads, such as the one in the gay/lesbian forum titled "lesbian fiction on kindle" and the new discussion we attempted to initiate called "kindle’s queer bias." But, to our amazement, aside from a troll wandering in on that latter thread and obfuscating things quite a bit with weird greetings, overwhelming apathy was the only response that we got. And plenty of it.
So we shrugged and walked away, and pondered in silence a different strategy.
In the first week of March 2009, it suddenly all became crystal clear to us. We pulled every single Saint Marie LGBT title from the Kindle store, deleted all gay/lesbian categories and tags from them, republished them as plain, old, ordinary romances, and then sat back to see what would happen. If we were right, if our theory correct, we reasoned, then we should have sales rankings in approximately twenty-four hours…
Twenty-four little hours later, I couldn’t help but whoop with joy. There were sales rankings on all of my titles in the Kindle store, and some were even on the bestselling lists! A week or two later, we began gingerly adding the gay/lesbian categories once again. This time, however, without the search tags — and without consequence.
Which implies this "glitch" isn't so accidental.
It happens I've only bought a few things from Amazon, but until this gets cleared up, that's probably how it's going to stay.
I was prone to thinking it was just that, a glitch of some sort.
Then I saw this: Amazon’s "Glitch" Myth Debunked
The writer spent a year being frustrated that her book wasn't indexing properly. She was told various things about the inability of the system to manualy add the data.
Keeping in mind now that writers and other creative types can sometimes be tragically conceited and self-fixated, my view of the "big picture" was still clouded by the firm belief that I was, for some reason, being singled out by Amazon. Realize, too, that at no point did they ever fess up to me that they had an anti-queer agenda. Thus, it did not occur to Team Saint Marie to "refine" our routine and random searches of their browse tree until the very last quarter of 2008, at which point we had such an epiphany and began feverishly cross-referencing popular gay and lesbian paperback titles with their alternate Kindle editions, discovering that those, too, had no sales rankings in the Kindle store.
In the first quarter of 2009, we undertook to publicize these startling findings on Amazon, both in the Kindle publishers’ forum and in various customer discussion threads, such as the one in the gay/lesbian forum titled "lesbian fiction on kindle" and the new discussion we attempted to initiate called "kindle’s queer bias." But, to our amazement, aside from a troll wandering in on that latter thread and obfuscating things quite a bit with weird greetings, overwhelming apathy was the only response that we got. And plenty of it.
So we shrugged and walked away, and pondered in silence a different strategy.
In the first week of March 2009, it suddenly all became crystal clear to us. We pulled every single Saint Marie LGBT title from the Kindle store, deleted all gay/lesbian categories and tags from them, republished them as plain, old, ordinary romances, and then sat back to see what would happen. If we were right, if our theory correct, we reasoned, then we should have sales rankings in approximately twenty-four hours…
Twenty-four little hours later, I couldn’t help but whoop with joy. There were sales rankings on all of my titles in the Kindle store, and some were even on the bestselling lists! A week or two later, we began gingerly adding the gay/lesbian categories once again. This time, however, without the search tags — and without consequence.
Which implies this "glitch" isn't so accidental.
It happens I've only bought a few things from Amazon, but until this gets cleared up, that's probably how it's going to stay.
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I've been meaning to make a post to my blog, "Why I Won't Buy a Kindle." You've now given me one more reason to avoid the Kindle, and also a reason to boycott Amazon until they become more "enlightened."
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http://www.hrc.org/news/11542.htm is just one of the lists out there. My point is, Bezos would have been discovered before this, dont you think???
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Hey, thanks for being so snotty! I appreciate it. I'm some asshole on the Web who believes shit like that. It came from somebody I trusted.
Bad Business
Money is green -- or it was, now it's multi-coloured -- and mine spends just as well as yours, regardless of interests and orientation.
Whatever is going on at Amazon is, at the very least, not something that is to the benefit of their stockholders.
It's bad business when you screw your investors.
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It's bad business. It screws the stockholders by (1) wasting money and (2) having to pay taxes on inventory that's not moving and is not likely to move.
If Mr Bezos wants to screw with the stockholders' investments, he needs to be the sole stockholder, not the majority stockholder.
Were I an Amazon stockholder, I'd be writing the SEC complaining of breach of fiduciary trust.
Re: Bad Business
Some obvious examples, off the top of my head:
* Jerry Yang of Yahoo turning down Microsoft.
* The Big Three automakers fighting tooth and claw against higher gas mileage standards.
* The current hoo-ha about CO2.
Jerry Pournelle has what he calls the Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In a given bureaucratic organization the managers will eventually run things to further their own ends, even at the expense of the ends of the organization as a whole. Pournelle uses this as a bludgeon against the government, but the behavior is just as pervasive (if not more so) in the private sector. Think of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert -- he's recognizable as an archetype for a reason. (Not that Pournelle will/would ever acknowledge that.)
Anyway... Given that Yang spent $26 billion at Yahoo! (to date) for the sole purpose of giving Microsoft a golden shower (and to think Eliot Spitzer was considered a spendthrift) and nothing came of the shareholder lawsuit that followed, I don't think a shareholder lawsuit at Amazon is likely to get anywhere. (Even though I've been talking up the possibility here and there.)
Re: Bad Business
It is an incredible pain in the ass for the company, even before they deal with the attending publicity. Should the company annoy the SEC sufficiently, it can order trading in the firm's stock suspended pending investigation.
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If they can manage to keep the pandering to the one group from being found out by the other, they have the best of worlds.
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Deceptions have a nasty habit of eventually being exposed. Now they've got both groups PO'd at them, plus a fair number of folks that genuinely don't care about it, but don't enjoy being used as a cat's paw.
Off the top of my head, I'd venture to say the GLBT market spends more on books than the bigots. Most of those folks that I know are voracious readers.
Re: Bad Business
I don't know that they've pissed off the bigotted crowd either. They might lose some if they, "have to buckle under to the loudmouths pushing, 'the gay agenda'", but right now they have the appearance of having been, "trying to do the right thing" to the bigotted minds.
So it's probably, at worst, a break even, on that front.
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Which is funny, because the one was primers for pennywhistle, but I look at as "music" and the rest has been photo-paper.
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It's been over two decades since I was in a photolab. I look at stuff now and then and marvel at how photography has changed. Lektra Labs, one of the premier manufacturers of pro lab equipment, isn't making darkroom equipment any more.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Re: Bad Business
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If it's even close to the 10x10 monster we had at Still Photo, it's a helluva machine.
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It'll print to 20x24. I don't know what I'd do if I had the money... that's really tempting. I'd have to cost out the paper/chemistry costs, and balance them against paper/ink costs.
Lust in my shriveled little heart.
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:)
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If that thing has a standard negative carrier too....
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Digital and lack of market share have driven all but a few B&W films from the market, although a version of Ektachrome and Kodachrome remain.
I'm waiting for a 4x5 digital back I can afford ...
Added commment: A couple of years ago, whilst on a trip South, we detoured around a GMCF and wound up passing by the Kodak plant in Eastern TN where they made film base for North America. The parking lot was all-but empty, mid-day, mid-week. It used to run 24/7. That's how severely digital has affected the film market.
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Thanks for that link; I like to have some to refute those who say it was no big deal, and it's over now.
Another friend linked to this article. I couldn't quite put my finger on why this 'glitch' troubled me so much, but the writer summed it up nicely -- "The issue with #AmazonFail isn't that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing "false" to "true" in filtering certain "adult" classified items, it's that Amazon's system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is part of "adult". And "gay" is part of "adult." In other words, #AmazonFail is about the subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms and classification that contain discriminatory ideas. When other employees use the system, whether they themselves agree with the underlying assumptions of the algorithms and classification system, or even realize the system has these point's of view built in, they can put those assumptions into force, as the Amazon France Employee apparently did according to Amazon."
I've bought quite a bit from Amazon in the past year, but no longer, until they [a] fix the problem and [b] apologize. (Notice how Amazon has 'explained', but still not offered an apology.) I like AfterEllen's suggestion to buy only GLBT books from Amazon -- but there are none I'm interested in. (I buy mostly DVDs.) But at least I can tell Amazon why I'm cancel\ling my account.
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