Just a couple of things for today. First the good news, PopCultureShock is having a Naruto giveaway, mainly to help jump-start our new discussion boards over there. Here’s the announcement from Manga Recon with links to the PCS announcement and the boards. It’s always tough getting new forums up and running, so I hope some of you will go join in!
Then for the bad… AmazonFail. Wow. Having just signed up this blog as an Amazon Associate maybe three days ago, I was pretty dismayed to discover that I was inadvertently promoting a corporation that would do something like this. For the three people left on the internet who don’t know, Amazon has stripped its sales rankings from what appears to be mainly LGBT-themed books, labeling them as “adult” content, despite the fact that many of the books contained little to no sexual content at all, and plenty of books with explicit (heterosexual) content remain ranked. What this means is that these unranked books do not come up through their search engine, and in fact, if you do an Amazon search for “homosexuality” now, most of what comes up are books on how to “cure” or prevent it. Amazon claims this was a “glitch,” despite the fact that people were initially told that this was new official policy.
Obviously this is disgusting and if they don’t turn this policy around very soon I’m going to remove every link to Amazon from this blog, because there is no way I’m going to support that. Fortunately, the entire internet is outraged, which may hopefully effect change. Over at AnimeVice, Gia has a post about how/if this affects the manga industry (ETA: check out Kuriousity‘s as well). I also liked Danielle Leigh’s message to her students, EREC’s response to Information Week’s statement, “…it’s premature to blame Amazon” (thanks, gloss), and this article from Jezebel. ETA: Also, this is pretty interesting, and makes me think I’ll be switching away from being an Associate really soon. Sad.
For now I’ll say, don’t click those Amazon links. Hopefully I won’t need to say it for long.
Anna says
April 13, 2009 at 12:50 pmI’m waiting to see what amazon does in the next couple days. I do get a tiny bit of money from my associates account, but if amazon doesn’t resolve this I might switch over to linking to RightStuf, which also seems to have an affiliate program.
Melinda Beasi says
April 13, 2009 at 2:41 pmOh, that’s good to know. Switching to RightStuf could work out well.
Estara says
April 13, 2009 at 1:02 pmAmazon.co.uk has also been reported as affected and I can personally affirm that Amazon.de also had the ranks removed from the offending books. I tested it with Alex Beecroft’s False Colors, which got a very good review on DearAuthor.com.
Estara says
April 13, 2009 at 1:08 pmHowever Brokeback Mountain has it’s “Amazon Verkaufsrang” position, so maybe it depends?
Danielle Leigh says
April 13, 2009 at 2:17 pmI don’t think films/dvds are affected…only books + some comics.
Estara says
April 13, 2009 at 3:29 pmHmm, but I checked the book version, not the DVD. I read on some of the initial post that the book of Brokeback Mountain was affected.
Melinda Beasi says
April 13, 2009 at 2:42 pmI think Kuriousity was saying that Amazon.ca was not as badly affected, which is interesting.
Danielle Leigh says
April 13, 2009 at 2:20 pmThanks for the linkage, I appreciate it. I know a number of my students “signed” the e-petition for sure….
What I really want is for Amazon.com to admit it made a mistake but we’ll see how this shakes out. How long could this take to fix after all, it seemed to happen so suddenly en masse? (the exception being a few “test cases” that occurred in Feb.)
Melinda Beasi says
April 13, 2009 at 2:44 pmYeah, I’m really disappointed (though not surprised) that they are trying to pretend it’s just a technical glitch. I mean, really, how can that be believed? I just read on Twitter that a few books have made it back into the rankings, but the vast majority are still left unranked.
Deanna Gauthier says
April 13, 2009 at 2:45 pmokay, so now there’s only 2 people on the internet who did not know about the amazon debacle. That’s just so infuriating and nausea-inducing. If they do not correct this quickly, I’m closing my Amazon seller account and refusing to buy any products through them.
Melinda Beasi says
April 13, 2009 at 4:06 pmIt’s pretty awful. I don’t understand how they are not apologizing and scrambling to fix it right away.
Rainy says
April 13, 2009 at 5:52 pmBecause that would mean that they were *wrong* and made a mistake and Amazon is never wrong and NEVER makes a mistake. Keh. Stupid fuckers
gloss says
April 13, 2009 at 3:31 pmThanks for the link to Feministing — that’s the second small-press author I’ve heard of who has heard from her publisher’s contact with Amazon. Combined with Craig Seymour’s issues, dating back to February, this stands for me as pretty strong confirmation of Amazon’s bad faith and general shittiness.
Melinda Beasi says
April 13, 2009 at 4:05 pmYeah, I’m sad to say I’m pretty well convinced of the general shittiness at this point.
duowolf says
April 13, 2009 at 5:24 pmFrom what I’ve heard around the net it might well of been a troll attack similer to what happened with strikethrough over on livejournal. Not sure how true that is though.
Melinda Beasi says
April 13, 2009 at 6:40 pmI’ve read some pretty convincing reports debunking that, but I suppose we never know for sure.
MidpointTradeBooks says
April 14, 2009 at 7:44 pmHi Melinda-
Thanks for the support! Here’s some in return!
Brittany
Melinda Beasi says
April 14, 2009 at 7:56 pm:D Thanks!