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+--- Thread: something smells RANK?!. . .Amazon wasn't suppressing gay, lesbian etc. books from sales rankings. . . (/showthread.php?tid=76347)
something smells RANK?!. . .Amazon wasn't suppressing gay, lesbian etc. books from sales rankings. . . - NewtonMP2100 - 04-14-2009
. . .it was a glitch. . .previous thread
Who moved my rank? Sales rank purged from Amazon
. . .Amazon.com apologized Monday for an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" that led to the sales ranking being removed from tens of thousands of books.
The online retailer initially said Sunday that a "glitch" had caused the problem and promised that the numbers would be restored. But Monday afternoon, sales numbers were still gone for such recent works as Chelsea Handler's "My Horizontal Life" and from such classics as Gore Vidal's "The City and the Pillar" and James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room."
"What kind of a childish game is this?" Vidal said Monday. "Why don't they just burn the books? They'd be better off and it's very visual on television."
On Monday, Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener called the deletions an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection." He said that 57,310 books in categories ranging from gay and lesbian literature to health and erotica had been affected.
"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," Herdener said. "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."
Authors strongly questioned Amazon's explanation, with some posting e-mails they had received from the online seller that said their books had been placed in an unranked "adult" category, excluded from some searches and best-seller lists. And the glitch dates back to at least February, when Craig Seymour noticed that the ranking for his memoir "All I Could Bare" had been deleted. (It came back, he said, a few weeks later.). . .
really a glitch. . .?
Re: something smells RANK?!. . .Amazon wasn't suppressing gay, lesbian etc. books from sales rankings. . . - deckeda - 04-14-2009
An embarrassment, caused not by software but by people making conscious decisions based on stupid assumptions.
OK, so now they'll fix it and it's yesterday's news. (Actually, it's Sunday's news. Traditional media, with lead feet, didn't report it until yesterday.)
But without the uproar, would they a) have stumbled upon it themselves and b) fixed it? The question here is how isolated groups and individuals act when in a vacuum of thought. That's a foretelling of the likelihood of something similar happening again.
Re: something smells RANK?!. . .Amazon wasn't suppressing gay, lesbian etc. books from sales rankings. . . - Jack D. - 04-14-2009
See... no one did this on purpose, it was just an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error". Sure, that's it. An error, a stupid computer glitch.
Re: something smells RANK?!. . .Amazon wasn't suppressing gay, lesbian etc. books from sales rankings. . . - digby - 04-16-2009
Well, I have a "Purchasing Glitch" that's preventing me from buying anything from Amazon until they explain more fully.
Amazon has an "embarrassing and ham-fisted error"... in honestly communicating with the public.