amazonfail: Just to get this out of the way...

I am quite well aware of the amazonfail phenomenon. And of course I have an opinion about it.

For those who are not aware of the situation, what is absolutely known is that Amazon.com, at first slowly and then in a torrent over Easter weekend, removed a multitude of LGBT and abuse-survival books from their rankings. Here are a handful of links: the story at Wikipedia's Amazon.com entry; the blog entry by Mark Probst (an author whose book was de-ranked in the process of this) that Wikipedia claims first brought this into the public eye; the Publisher's Weekly article wherein Amazon blames the situation on a glitch; and a Theory proposed via LiveJournal that makes a fair amount of sense (though the writer could perhaps have been less arrogant about it). The other links I have seen have been histrionic or condescending, depending on the side they take, so I would rather not debut them here (because avoiding bias in a discussion about bias is going to be oh-so-easy to do...).

My personal feeling on the matter is this: Somehow, somewhere, Amazon screwed up. The "Bantown" LJ theory seems plausible, as does some sort of poorly-chosen set of criteria for flagging books as "adult" (akin to when LiveJournal banned a bunch of non-erotic communities a while back). We can argue about Amazon's culpability until the sun goes down, but they definitely made some sort of mistake somewhere, in addition to the even worse mistake of sending what seems like a form letter to Probst instead of really investigating the problem.

Unfortunately, Amazon's mistake hit two of the Internet's major ammo dumps: the LGBT community, and abuse survivors. These are groups who have legitimate grievances as regards their overall treatment, and whom I would never want to see treated as anything but human beings, but which, as a result of their experiences, are liable to react badly and to trigger others not in those groups into temper loss.

So, Amazon screwed up, somehow; and then the Internet opened up a fresh box of berserk rage, and started attacking/boycotting/deriding Amazon. Whatever Amazon did at that point was going to be moot; until they find the actual culprits behind this problem (whether human beings or lines of code), present unassailable evidence that these are the actual culprits and not scapegoats, and find a way to both reverse the problem and take action against those culprits, they will be bearing a massive black eye.

And in the meantime, the attacks against Amazon will get more unreasonable, spurred by corporate stupidity as Amazon flails to mend the gaping hole in its PR; the boycotts will spread, to the point where many accounts lost during this period will never come back; sales may dip, leading to damage to publishers and writers, or sales may barely be affected, leading to a dismissal of a very important group of voices as just more screaming on the Internet. All sides of all debates will think the other sides are even dumber than before, and we will slouch on without any real progress being made. This is how Internet drama goes, with a wide array of rapid coverage forcing people to respond to breaking news before they themselves are certain of what's going on.

In the end, I can only say this: keep buying books, from wherever you think best. And if you have some data to add to this discussion, please, don't hesitate.