Up Front: Amazons Are Not the Only Fruit
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er, fulled/filled English/Schminglish.
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Y'all probably saw this already, but just in case.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/14/amazon-gay-sex-rankings-apology
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Y'all probably saw this already, but just in case.
It's extraordinarily generous for The Guardian to use the word 'apologises' to describe that. It's the Amazon form letter I link to in the column. Here it is in its entirety. Choccy fish for anyone who spots anything in it that looks like 'sorry'.
This is an embarrassing and hamfisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to gay and lesbian themed titles.
"In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine, and erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
"Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
You'll notice that the 'broad range of categories' is all sexuality-related stuff. It's not cooking and geography and astronomy. So they haven't even admiited that the vast majority of affected works were LGBT titles, and those that weren't dealt with things like disabled sex.
Since this, Amazon haven't so much as issued a press release, let alone actually apologised - a gesture that would cost them nothing at all.
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