#Amazonfail Fiasco Leaves Bookbuyers Suspicious

The big story in the book world yesterday was the fact that Amazon went on a shopping trip. The Seattle-based bookseller acquired Lexcycle, the company that makes Stanza, which is a free e-book application for the Apple iPhone. From The New York Times:

Stanza allows users to browse a library of around 100,000 books and periodicals for the iPhone, many of them in the ePub format -- a widely accepted standard for e-books that Amazon has yet to support with its proprietary Kindle platform.

After the news was announced yesterday, the blogosphere and the Twitterverse (did I just seriously type those words?) started talking about what the move might mean: was there something darker and more sinister behind the announcement? Something beyond what Amazon “spokeswoman” Cinthia Portugal told the Times, that “Lexcycle is a smart, innovative company, and we look forward to working with them to innovate on behalf of readers.”

Consumer suspicion is understandable. The Amazon-Lexcycle deal comes just weeks after a “glitch” in Amazon’s ranking system was seen to be dropping many books with possible gay or lesbian content from its ranking system.

As I write this, I suspect that things still aren’t what they should be with Amazon results. At 12:15 am Tuesday morning, the number one result Amazon returned when the word “homosexual” was typed into its search bar was Loving Homosexuals as Jesus Would: A Fresh Christian Approach (Brazos Press). Somehow that result doesn’t feel quite right. It’s possible Amazon needs to poke at their search algorithms still further. More importantly, it illustrates consumer’s wariness of Amazon right now, a wariness that has many former customers researching alternatives for online book purchasing and vending.

Amazon Won’t Get Off So Easily

Don’t blame the French! That’s what Silicon Valley veteran technologist Mary Hodder explains on TechCrunch. In a guest-blog-style posting, she tells us why online bookseller Amazon are probably being big, fat liars when they tried to tell shocked booklovers that their #Amazonfail fiasco of last weekend was a “glitch”:

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.

There’s a lot more, of course. As well, there’s a very entertaining exchange of comments that argues for and against Hodder’s arguments. You can find all of that here.

#Amazonfail Sets Blogosphere A-Twitter

At this point, it just doesn’t seem possible that anyone hasn’t heard of the angry storm released by online bookseller Amazon this past weekend when rankings began mysteriously dropping from books with gay and lesbian themes.

We’d held off reporting on it because, for a while there on Sunday and Monday, the story kept changing from minute to minute and it struck us that half-baked reportage would do little beyond adding to the infamy of a few characters who emerged from the melee who seemed to have little else in mind. Even loading Amazon with additional attention seemed counterproductive under the circumstances. (Insert subliminal message here: buy indie!)

Even as I write this, very early Tuesday morning, I find myself reluctant to pronounce on this one, though it’s possible it’s just because I’m personally sick of hearing about it: somehow, there’s just a sort of nasty, tawdry feel about the whole thing. Seriously: are we even still playing these morality games? For some ridiculous reason, I’d thought more of Amazon. I know: I should have known better. (Buy indie!)

If you’re not sick of the whole sad mess, or if you’d like to explore the details on your own, Booktrade.info did a nice job of rounding up the significant players in the reportage thus far, while The Wall Street Journal here explains how the whole #Amazonfail thing came to be and offers a very concise blow-by-blow of the whole messy business.