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Shame on you, Amazon!
Wow. Somehow that really pisses me off! It seems that some uptight tit at Amazon has decided that they need to "protect" their customers from ... "offensive" material by removing it from normal search results.
So far so good - after all it's their shop and all and they decide what they want to put into their virtual shopping window and what not.
A closer look, though, shows that this seems to be aimed mainly at books with a gay/lesbian theme, *including* romance novels for "young adults" that aren't explicit at *all* even by the most narrow minded definition. Unless, of course, you think that "gay" or "lesbian" in itself is a bad thing.
Now - I never ever even *considered* buying a gay/lesbian themed book - not because I'm against it, I simply don't care. Hell, I even find lesbian porn - no matter how hot the women involved might look - rather boring, usually using fast forward when a lesbo scene comes up in a flic I'm watching.
But somehow the whole matter still makes me kind of angry - as it often does when someone from the US (in this case "someone" is a whole company) wants to force their lame "morals" onto everyone.
Actually I was thinking about buying a Fleshlight (tm) via Amazon (basically some rubber thing you stick you shlong into to masturbate), but I guess there's enough other places to get one...
Read more at Mark Probst's Livejournal - he's one of the affected authors and can explain the whole situation much better than me.
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Amazonfail resolved?
From Mark Probst's blog (as linked in the main article):
"Amazon has released a statement of apology stating that it was an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" that pertained to 57,310 listings. They also say that It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles. So it's over. Amazon admits they goofed, and I, for one, shall give them the benefit of the doubt and say I do not believe that there was any malicious intent. Case closed."
Weeeeell... To me it means case *kinda* closed. While the explanation Amazon gave for this major fuckup might be true it's still (to me) a little worrying that they internally are thinking about removing "adult" (or whatever else) material from their search results without:
- telling the customer that they're doing so.
- allowing the customer to turn off this filter the way, for example, google does.
Also the explanation they came forward with still seems a little fishy to me. Oversimplified: According to them someone at Amazon France implemented something by mistake and by bad luck the place where it was implemented into the system changed the search globally for all Amazon pages (America, Canada, France etc...).
But then: Why was I able to check on Amazon Germany and couldn't find any restrictions in my search results *there*? While searching for "Homosexuality" on Amazon US only gave me books along the lines of "Gay is evil and an illness and how believing in baby Jesus magically can cure you" Amazon Germany still had all the normal search results.
Something still smells weird...