I’ve clearly been under a rock recently and so missed the news about Amazon’s ridiculous failures in de-ranking. Y’know, where they “inadvertently” removed the sales rankings in many books with gay or lesbian themes in them somewhere. Something to do with adult content. NPR explains. Tweeple are outraged. Amazon blames some French guy.  Tweeple apologize, sort of.

People in the tubes are predictably upset and I was kind of surprised when I was reading some of the comments at NPR.

Comments include sentiments similar to JustAnnie’s proclamation that she’s pretty much done with Amazon forever; feeling both lied to and discriminated against are more than she can take. Purly and others assert that Jeff Bezos is not a prude or a conservative and Amazon clearly fumbled here but meant no harm.  Clearly people are taking this stuff very seriously, very personally.

I guess when I heard and read about the issue it never occurred to me to think that someone made this decision on discriminatory grounds, for personal reasons. As noted in the NPR comments, Amazon has had financial success selling any number of adult books in the past (hey, not everyone wants to lurk around the OPAC looking for su:erotic fiction) so I don’t think it makes sense to assume any scenario in which they make it harder to sell something that’s got to be doing well.

I think this is what happens when you taxonomize in a vacuum. It seems perfectly clear to me that some well-meaning team of geeks (or some po’ French dude, apparently) somewhere structured this puppy in to existence. I’m sure there was an intent to make those materials more easily searchable by the folks who are looking for them and less prominently visible to folks who’d rather not know about those results. Bingobango and a few keystrokes later it’s done. Okay, we know it took longer than that. There were a number of D&D breaks and quests for cheese.

What I think is interesting is what this guy says over here, that no one else seems too worried about (emphasis added):

Daisey: I doubt anything will happen. While embarrassing to the public, it will fade quickly as the changes get reverted. Amazon is no longer the company it once was: it’s just an online Wal-Mart. Like any behemoth, there’s little accountability inside the bubble.

More interesting is that everyone in publishing entrusts their rankings and status to a single provider. That’s the story no one likes thinking about in publishing.

That bit about publishing and rankings gives me the heebies.  Pervasive Amazon is always a bit creepy to me. It first happened when the Amazon/Target thing happened.  I’ve talked about how we’re switching (PCC) to WorldCat Local soon (nowish, in fact) and one of the features you can enable in WCL involves rankings from Amazon. I’ve been wondering what the hell OCLC were thinking, and they’ve been asked as much at meetings I’ve attended and no one can say why they felt embedding Amazon ratings (and links to purchase materials) was necessary. Or maybe they were rankings. What’s the difference between a rating and a ranking? And where do reviews come in? Anyway. I’m not entirely opposed to giving people rankings or purchasing options, I just think it would be great to select those sources on our own. Then I’d send people to somewhere local and save on shipping and emissions.

Monoliths are another story, nothing there surprises me. I just like that phrase about the bubble. *eyes the ALA bubble warily*