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| 12 Apr 2009 13:12 |
| That ain't it, kid |
| Public |
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Let us suppose you're a local bookstore, and that you decide, after evaluating the ethical and business pro's and con's, you want to sell erotica. However, you want to make the erotica available only to people who want to buy erotica and, furthermore, are of legal age. In that case, you set up an explicitly designated area of the store to contain erotica, and keep a sharp eye on who goes there. Problem, except perhaps for local boycotts, solved.
Now let's assume you're an online bookstore. You also want to sell erotica. However, you have a new problem -- when Susie Jones, aged seven, is looking for the Count who goes "von-ha-ha-ha!", you don't want to show her titles about the Count Of All Possible -philias, Including Sixteen You Didn't Think Were Physically Likely. There are several reasonable things you could do:
- Set up a dedicated search box for sex-related books and products.
- Force customers to opt-in to a cookie that allows the display of erotica in search results.
- Put some very expensive software people on to the task of automatically inferring whether or not a particular searcher is looking for erotica.
Or you could be Amazon.com. And then you decide that the solution is to remove all gay-themed works from the sales rankings. (Not just gay erotica, mind -- gay-themed. One of Mark Probst's, the poster I linked to, commenters discovered that "Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History " no longer has an Amazon sales ranking. ) And when somebody actually searches for a specific gay-themed book -- Mark Probst's The Filly, say -- you offer only the Kindle edition. BN.com will sell you the paperback.) See Meta_writer for more gory details. Among the no-longer-ranked books: Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, The Well of Loneliness, and Brokeback Mountain. Here's the official response Mr. Probst, who is also a publisher, got: "In consideration of our entire customer base, 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." - We're going to make it hard to find naughty books, where our definition of "naughty" indicates that we don't have a competent programmer in the house.
- We think anything having to do with gay or lesbian people is naughty.
- ...
- But if you *do* want to buy naughty books, do it on a Kindle, thus increasing our profits.
I think something is missing in the syllogism... Note: When I sign out of Amazon, I see The Filly in both the paperback and the Kindle; only when signed in am I limited to the electronic version. I don't, as it happens, own a Kindle. For amusement's sake, I just searched for the Victorian collection The Pearl, which, trust me, has no redeeming social importance, and which is very much in print. Yup, available on the Kindle only. I can only guess that this is the modern equivalent of putting all the good bits in Latin. Edit: Amazon's Contact Us button can be found here (you may have to be signed in), and one of the more piquant options offered is having *them* call *you*.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) violetisblue |
| 12 Apr 2009 20:57 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| Violet is Cooties |
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I always suspected this whole Kindle thing was a fucking scam from the get-go, and this just helps confirm it.
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| serrana |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:05 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| books |
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*snerk* I am so amused that your response to this is, "Not only are you morons, but your software conceptualization is substandard."
We've been doing our shopping at Powell's and ABE for years; this just confirms the wisdom of that choice. Amazon.com is also, as I recall, a long-time donor to conservative politicians.
And if you really need (another) copy of The Pearl, I can probably hook you up with a free e-text. I, er, just happened to stumble across someone's very large collection of vintage bawdy texts, the other day.
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| jonquil |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:06 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Thank you, but The Pearl is just the first well-known piece of het-ish erotica I could think of. Which does say rather a lot about me.
(edit: And censorship is all very well, but stupid software gets me where I live. *g*)
Edited at 2009-04-12 09:07 pm (UTC)
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| serrana |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:13 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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I went and plugged in the name of the first elderly smut I could think of, and the closest thing they're carrying is The Wordsworth Book of Classic Erotica which, no, hasn't got a sales rank.
It has, however, got a really amusing list of statistically improbable phrases. Oh, Amazon, you vile smut-peddler, you; even I don't know what a "kangaroo fuck" is.
(Yes, I know, that's why I was laughing so hard.)
(ETA: Jeez, massive tag-closing fail on my part. I blame being up at dawn to run the sunrise service.)
Edited at 2009-04-12 09:14 pm (UTC)
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| maga_dogg |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:24 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| sultry |
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"Double gamahuche" sounds like some kind of Southwest fusion cooking. (And, having looked it up, it would have been far more intriguing if I had left it to the imagination.)
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| serrana |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:38 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Yeah, I have never thought that was a particularly melodious turn of phrase.
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| maga_dogg |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:44 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| asymmetry |
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The names are excellent, though. I have got the title 'Lady Pokingham and the Mutual Jouissance' stuck in my head and will have to find some use for it, somehow.
Dammit, this is the second conversation I've had today that strayed into vintage smut. Clearly the gods did not intend for me to have a productive afternoon.
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Be aware that Amazon owns ABE.
Powell's is still independent, surviving the Darwinian sort-out by feasting on the carcasses of other independents as they go down. I'd spend my money with Powell's (and the Strand, by the way: they ship), for now.
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| serrana |
| 13 Apr 2009 00:17 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Oh, do they? Well, hell.
Powell's is not un-local to me, which is why I give them my money.
My more-local independents, I'm sorry to say, suck quite a lot. As in, they can't be bothered to alphabetize their shelves, and they don't bother getting in new releases.
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As is usual in these moments of corporate homophobia, the implementation of the homophobia is itself confusing and contradictory. I mean, what?
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| brewsternorth |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:26 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| tEcHnIcAl dIfFiCuLtIeS |
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Keyword- and search-term-based, I suspect. They're running an algorithm in a hurry and not necessarily seeing what's caught in the net.
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| jonquil |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:47 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Which is, in itself, an ethical decision. Do you believe that *nobody* did a test run and looked for false drops? In a decision involving their sales database?
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| jonquil |
| 12 Apr 2009 23:04 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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I have known coders who were that stupid. I have not known large, entrenched software companies -- like Amazon -- who didn't have processes in place.
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| daedala |
| 12 Apr 2009 23:06 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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As someone who tends to work for very large banks, I think I have to keep my mouth shut. Ahem.
(The current company is mostly ok. :)
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| jonquil |
| 12 Apr 2009 23:08 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Heh.
Let me rephrase -- I can pretty much guarantee that *somebody* told them how stupid this was at some point, and was ignored. (As a person in the business of telling people how stupid they are being, I can imagine you rolling your eyes in agreement.)
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| daedala |
| 13 Apr 2009 00:15 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Oh, yes, I'm quite sure of that.
I was testing the process and ran code that blocked internet access for the entire internal network. The person who wrote it kept being slapped down for bad code, then a reorg happened and he'd convince a new manager he was competent, and then he'd get slapped down again...
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| alterjess |
| 13 Apr 2009 00:20 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| aeryn shooting |
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Here at Auntie Beeb's Corporate Subsidiary, "upgrades" and "features" are regularly pushed through to our worldwide sales site by the UK-based dev team without anyone consulting the US-based staff. Because that would mean talking to the pushy Americans and we might want them to change things that are broken about their shiny new toy. Or worse yet, we might question why Useless Shiny New Toy is being pushed through ahead of Critical Bug Fixes We Told You About Over A Year Ago.
The result is a site that is in many places either unusable or incomprehensible to most US clients, but fixing it would be too expensive because we didn't speak up during the development phase.
So yeah, I can imagine exactly how this particular incident at Amazon slipped through the cracks.
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| jonquil |
| 13 Apr 2009 16:15 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Oh, yeah. The bigger the corporation, the less likely the reality-raiser can succeed.
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| lexin |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:23 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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This Kindle thing...the other thing that's weird about it is that you can only buy them in the US. The biggest selling book reader in the UK seems to be the Sony ebook reader, which doesn't take the same files at all.
And am I pissed that when I bought mine it was from Amazon!
And you can get out of copyright erotica free in any format you care to name from http://manybooks.net/ Fuck the Kindle and paying for it, that's what I say.
Edited at 2009-04-12 09:25 pm (UTC)
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| holli |
| 12 Apr 2009 21:43 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| look out booster! brain freeze! |
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Hm. I work for a used bookstore that sells on Amazon, and I know for a fact that we have gay-themed lit on the shelves (though it's vastly outnumbered by disquieting fundamentalist books and terrible, terrible supernatural romances, sigh). I should talk to our manager and see if Amazon won't respond to pressure from its sellers better than from its customers.
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| holli |
| 12 Apr 2009 22:00 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| doggone it i'm a super hero! |
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I don't know if this is making a significant dent in our sales, but our big!boss (not to be confused with my uncle, who owns the place, which I guess technically makes him biggest!boss?) is the sort of person who's pretty good at kicking up a fuss. So I shall bring it up tomorrow.
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| davehogg |
| 12 Apr 2009 22:20 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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The Kindle-only thing seems to be a very limited issue - Brokeback Mountain, Heather Has Two Mommies and The Mayor of Castro Street are all available in regular form, and not at all in Kindle form.
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| jonquil |
| 12 Apr 2009 22:24 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Somebody on my flist says that apparently the Kindle has its own search rankings. They may not have been 'sanitized'.
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| jonquil |
| 12 Apr 2009 22:39 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Sorry, I was imprecise. When I did a search, the Kindle edition showed up, but the print edition did not. The print edition *did* show up at BN.com
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