Nicola Griffith and David Gerrold Hit By Amazon Fail

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Submitted by erika on 4/13/09 2:36pm
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By now I'm sure you've heard of Amazon Fail. If you were out doing things like having Easter dinner this weekend and happened to miss the internet, here's a quick recap: a bunch of GLBT books were removed from Amazon search results. Aside from assuring everyone that they are working to fix it, Amazon has declined to comment further.

While this was most likely a boneheaded programming error, it certainly looks from the outside like a conspiracy to sweep GLBT authors and books with GLBT themes under the rug. I sincerely doubt that this is the case, but I can't fault anyone for taking the harsher view. At the very least, it's an appalling disaster, and one which has apparently been going on for several months before it rolled onto Twitter and into the global internet consciousness.

Two books by openly gay science fiction authors have been caught up in Amazon Fail: David Gerrold's The Martian Child, and Nicola Griffith's Ammonite. Science fiction blog IO9 asked David Gerrold and Nicola Griffith for their reactions. David Gerrold seems miffed but slightly amused by the inconsistency. Nicola Griffith, on the other hand, is not at all amused. And who can blame her?

"Writing is my only source of income. No listing = no sales. Taken to its logical extreme, this policy could mean I starve-that I starve because I'm queer."

Amazon will presumably have this issue fixed shortly. In the mean time, I suggest that you show your support for Gerrold and Griffith by purchasing copies of their books... from anywhere but Amazon.

Comments

Thanks for posting this; it's

Submitted by lisala on 4/13/09 4:47pm.

Thanks for posting this; it's Nicola Griffith, by the way. No "s." Here's her blog. It's not just GLBT books; it's books that have a variety of metadata tags in Amazon's Category listing that some dweeb thinks equate to "adult." Books about sex for the physically disabled, for instance, are removed from sales rankings. So are a number of classic novels, and queer fic that has no sexual content.

Gay and Lesbian is one of the category tags; that's why books like Heather has Two Mommies, has had its sales ranking removed, for instance. Other books include E. M. Forster's novel Maurice, some editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a variety of books about feminist sexuality, but not Playboy's Centerfold books, because they're tagged with "nudity," which is, apparently, not on the verbotten list. Thousands of books are being removed from the sales rankings.

You can read more about it here, and there's a good discussion of the meta data and the categories here on the Dear Author blog.

Thanks for the correction -

Submitted by erika on 4/13/09 4:52pm.

Thanks for the correction - argh, I don't know why my fingers insist on typing "Griffiths." I clearly caught half of the Ss before posting, but not all of them!

I've been following the Metafilter thread since yesterday afternoon. It seems to be the most frequently-updated source of news (and instant debunking of same, when necessary).