An “embarrassing and ham-fisted” error…

Yes, that’s what the folks at Amazon are saying now about the mess that their cataloging system became over the weekend.

What they aren’t doing is explaining how the error came to pass, nor are they apologising for it.

From “glitch” to “cataloging error” that affected 57,310 books is a pretty big leap.

Thank heavens for citizen journalism… since it seems the most plausible explanation of all comes from a former employee (Mike Daisey, also a writer, who has written a rather popular book about his years working for Amazon). The tl;dr version goes like this: an employee at Amazon.fr mistakenly enabled the “adult” filter (reserved for things like sex toys, to keep them from popping up on innocent, unrelated front page searches) on a whole bunch of books. It would seem there was some confusion in that employees mind between the way Amazon mean the tag “adult” (read: sex toys and pr0n) and the employee’s understanding of it (read: anything intended for an adult audience) (although “Heather has Two Mommies” is a picture book for kids, it had the identifying tag “LGBT” which got swept up in the (overzealous? daft? censorious?) employee’s “adult” ranking). The system them automagically categorised all books with any of the tags the employee flipped the switch on as “adult” and removed them from searches, also hiding (but not deleting) their sales ranks.

This problem only became visible on Amazon sites that have “safe search” protection built in to them – the German Amazon site has no such thing and its listings were unaffected. The US and UK sites do have this protection, and thus the twitterati were soon able to compile a partial list of titles affected. This added fuel to the “omg censorship!” fire, and led to Amazon calling in staff to deal with a problem with the highest internally ranked severity code they have.

For an inside look at Amazon’s in-house reponse, look here. And check out Lilith Saintcrow’s blog for the nitty-gritty here.

One of the most interesting parts is that the employee who messed up is identified as a CS rep. A customer service rep? A customer service rep with enough access to the cataloging and database code to cause a shitstorm like this? Really, Amazon, really? (It’s not that I don’t believe it, but that I think it’s insane that a bottom rung employee can be granted enough access to the framework of the global site template to make a mess like this. CSRs (and I know because I was one) are not always the brightest bulbs in the lighting-rig. They should have sod all access to the sites global directory, let alone category-switching access on a global level).

The other part, that made me giggle, is the acknowledgement in there that Amazon hide sales rankings on pr0n and sex toys in some countries. They do not want you to know how many people buy butt-plugs and dildos (to use the two most often cited examples) from them. Prurient, silly and rather amusing.

A lot of people are saying that this doesn’t explain emails sent to people like Mark R. Probst, some of them sent as far back as February – but I think that was a result of what the hacker claimed to have exploited – a couple of people tagged his book as “adult” and some flesh-and-blood person agreed with them, and manually switched that listing. It would also explain why it took them so long to switch it back, since someone possibly had to read the book to determine it was un-deserving of the adult tag.

My hope is that this teaches Amazon to vastly restrict their employees’ access to the cataloging system so this does not happen again.

And another thing, yes Amazon, you are a hella big company – but in all of this mess, and your subsequent statements, you have forgotten to use a very important word. That word is: “sorry”. I’d advise you incorporate that word into your next statement post-haste.

No-one is too big to have to apologise.

Amazon fail…

Sigh. Here’s me with my bad back, wanting to do nothing more than relax and enjoy Easter Sunday with some chocolate and a couple of good books, and then I get wind of something that makes posting imperative…

Given the fact that I work in an old-stylee bricks-n-mortar bookstore, there are times when I’m not Amazon’s biggest fan (something I have alluded to in previous posts). I’m not beyond ordering from them, but only DVD boxsets since I prefer to source books elsewhere (from work, or Abe/Biblio for o.o.p. titles).

This weekend, however, Amazon have been caught out, pulling one of the dumbest corporate moves I can think of. In a week where two US states approved gay marriage, and things seem to be moving nicely towards nobody giving a crap who anyone else likes to sleep with (despite all the attempt at hysteria-generation by the National Organisation for (straight) Marriage – which has mostly resulted in giggle fits at their misappropriation of “NOM” as a trademark, and the inclusion of gay personals slang in their main campaign (2M4M) title), Amazon (AMZN in case you want to dump your shares…) have removed sales ranking from a plethora of gay, lesbian and otherwise queer books. This effectively means that those books will no longer be accessible through a general search on the site. In fact as of now, an Amazon search for “homosexuality” brings up as its top result “A Parent’s guide to Preventing Homosexuality” which sounds like a pretty dangerous book to me. Telling any parent in this day and age that their gay child can (or should be)  be “fixed” is loathsome, false and bordering on criminal.

Amazon’s “excuse” for this is that:  we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Um, possibly, except you can still search for Penthouse “books” and sex toys …so that seems like a sort of specious argument. Especially given the fact that some of the censored books do not even contain any sex. At all. Not so much as a snog. And even if they did, listing them in a search is not forcing anyone to buy them. Just like Vermont and Iowa legalising gay marriages does not mean everyone has to run out and marry someone of the same sex.

The internets have quickly mobilised to fight Amazon on this, and since the web is where they have their entire presence, they should be quaking in their boots right now. People on the web detest any form of censorship, booksellers and librarians hate it even more than most, and Amazon pulling a lame move like this has engendered the ire of just about everyone with a net connection (save possibly whoever lobbied for Amazon to introduce this new “policy”). A movement is afoot, dubbed amazonfail, to highlight their stupid-ass censorship, and this post is my small contribution to it.There is also a movement toward redefining “Amazon rank” to mean that Amazon (with this new policy) are more than a bit rank themselves as a corporate entity.

See here for the new definition, soon also to be available from the Urban dictionary. Smart Bitches (by virtue of being Smart…) have a great capsule view of the situation here and there is a list of some of the affected books available online here.

In fact, thanks to Amazon, we’re having a general throwback to the 1920’s with both Lady Chatterly’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness getting the chop from rankings too. I seem to remember there having been obscenity trials back in the day when those books were originally published, where judges ultimately (and in the case of the former, somewhat belatedly) defended their right to be sold, and read. Amazon is now cack-handedly trying to reverse these decisions by making it harder to find and purchase such books through their site.

I can think of no logical reason, apart from conservative/religious political pressure why Amazon would do something so pro-censorship and anti-reader. They need to be shown that readers will not stand for such nonsense.

This story was originally broken by Mark R. Probst on his blog here and an online petition can be found here.

As of now over 2,000 people have signed it, and while I’ve been typing this post tweetdeck has blipped an average of 30 tweets per minute containing amazonfail in them somewhere. Add your name to the petition or your tweet to the stream, and let them know that censorship is uncool and bad for business!

Adding screenie above for the “screenshot or it didn’t happen” crowd in case the Amazon elves re-gay the site while I’m asleep.

Further edit (Monday 17.45) It would appear that an internet troll is claiming responsibility for the whole debacle. You can read his claims for yourself here. Only problem I have with this explanation (that he was in it for the lulz, and to whip up an internet shitstorm just because he could) is that his posted code does not work. Ooopsie, troll fails at trolling. The other problem is that his “issue” was with Craigslist and not Amazon, so why he should “hit” the latter over the former is beyond me. Looks to me like a troll trying to be an even bigger troll by casting aspersions on the reality of the situation. If the code was something that would have worked, I may have fallen for it myself (thank whatever for my rampant geekdom). See here for a breakdown by someone better than me at translating techyspeak to english on why the code fails.

Still no word from Amazon, beyond “glitch” and “we’re working on it”. The “glitch” excuse makes no sense given e-mails sent out by the CS department and quoted above, the troll’s excuse fails, not only on code but also on the delisting of Lady Chatterly, The Joy of Sex and other straight “adult” titles.

I think we’d all like to know what Amazon have to say about all of this.
They’re being terribly terribly quiet….

Oh ha ha, ha ha ha…

I love the way amazon keeps sending me out recommendations, I truly do. But the one I got today made me nearly  fall off my chair laughing. In one of my insomniac periods some time back, I decided to teach Amazon’s recommendation system about what I like to read, and so I spent several hours (the wee small ones that seem to extend forever when you can’t sleep) telling it all about what I had read.

Interesting point here – I recently (yeah, couldn’t sleep again) totted up how many of the “1001 books to read before you die” that I had already read. Le answer? 641 (yes, I know, too many, it actually gave me a bit of a fright).

So imagine the hilarity when Amazon send one of their mails to me containing the following (direct cut’n'paste quote):

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Daisy Miller (Penguin Classics) by Henry James have also purchased The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection: More than 1000 of the Greatest Classics. For this reason, you might like to know that The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection: More than 1000 of the Greatest Classics is now available.  You can order yours for just $7,989.50 ($5,423.80 off the list price) by following the link below

(end cut’n'paste)

*coughs* Just $7,989.50?!?!?!?

Now call me a book snob, but that sounds like an offer best availed of by someone who does not read at all, but has fallen into a fortune and wants to have a study in their home, filled with, y’know classy books. Not someone like me who lives in a basement (or, if you prefer, abasement) that is already filled with tall, cluttered bookshelves and perilously inclining towers of books that will not fit on said bookshelves but instead climb up the sides of them like some kind of mutated bookish kudzu. See, I love books, and the thought of buying them in bulk, unseen, like that is just not something I could ever consider. Besides, I probably have a few of them already. Most people probably do. And if I had in the ballpark of $8k dollars to spare (goes without saying that I don’t, or I wouldn’t be living in a basement with no bloody central heating…..), I’d use it to have my living room kitted out with wall-round floor-to-ceiling shelving for the books I already have, and already love too much to part with.  In fact, I’d probably go for that over the heating – there would have to be some insulation value there, right?

So, surely Amazon’s computer shouldn’t be pegging book nerds like me, the ones who have already read the less famous Henry James books, the ones who, instead like the customer in that memorable episode of Black Books want to buy leather-bound editions of anything to make their office look good.  These aren’t even leather-bound, they seem to be the regular paperback editions. Plus they’re all Penguin – so right there you’re going to be missing out on some must-read books (y’know the ones Faber and other publishers have the rights to, for example).

So, am I right to find this funny (both ha ha and weird) or am I being unreasonable?

Is it not also somewhat odd that in a global recession, people are being mass-mailed about something that costs nigh on $8,000?

And as for “people who bought x, also bought y” – just how many people have already spent $7,989.50 on this set to generate the mail-out? Surely not more than a handful? Is a handful enough for the Amazon uber-computer to spam anyone who has ever bought Henry James (and not even from them I might add) or any one of the other authors contained in the package???

Not a smart mail-out Amazon, go tinker with your filtering system a bit more.

But thanks for the laugh!