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Monday, April 13th, 2009
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1:14a - On Amazon
I was in the middle of writing a post about how I thought this was a poor enactment of a bit of stupid spin (it ain't doing what they say it will any day of the week) and I was checking out whether what they' done was just to remove the rating by whether a book had a 'gay' or similar tag...
And it seems like they might be.
Which put a most evil way of sabotaging this inadequately thought out policy into my head.
It'd need a few more people to check whether this would actually work (it is only a mad-cap thought) but what if people went out and tagged books that haven't any adult content as having it?
I mean, Harry Potter is definitely gay. So is Twilight. So are all those cookbooks by men...
[if one were going to experiment with this I would suggest not picking small sales and midlist authors, who could lose out but go where amazon makes it's money and the bestsellers]
EDIT: really, I have no idea if this has any direct effect (chances are they're using some kind of poorly applied marketing tags to sort the 'adult' content and that those don't show up on the pages) but hey, scientific experiment produces data :)
EDIT 2: http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/12/amazon-possibly-using-category-metadata-to-filter-rankings/ I still claim SCIENCE! ::grins::
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2:37a - The Post I Was Writing
I'm still paying the price for yesterday's adrenaline rush so forgive me not yelling about this... and if you can, forgive me for not seeing it as primarily a GLBT issue.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/ plus a lot of other places, seek and ye shall find.
Amazon -- and Amazon.co.uk seems to be doing this also, which is unusual because changes to the US site are sometimes trickle-fed to us after a while or never happen at all...
Amazon has removed their Amazon ratings from a lot of books.
"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."
This is probably the stupidest and laziest way of implementing such a policy I can think of -- and I've run into several stupidities from Amazon.co.uk. so from them stupid isn't new it's expected.
But the policy itself annoys me.
Not just that the way they've chosen to enact it seems to be classifying anything with the word gay (or whatever) in the marketing, or title, or tags (or however they're picking some books out) as adult, but the one that says any book they've deemed to be adult has to be treated differently from all the others.
I am an adult. I move in a world full of adults. And I am kind of pissed that Amazon is denying me the adult world I live in because it's too lazy to cater for the juvenillisers in our society any other way than by putting books I might want to read in a back room where I am unlikely to run into them unless I know to ask (even if lots of other people know to ask and have done so).
It's just that step further than putting them on the top shelf... and yes, I'm a short person.
Most of the books they claim to be targetting were never going to make it into any bestseller listing. Those they have targetted that would have made it ... deserve to be there.
Heck, if they're bestsellers then why should I be protected from knowing? Why should I be denied that knowledge of my own society (that people buy books other people don't think they should read)
This is not going to prevent me from buying a book and then being shocked to death by two men/women kissing. Any more than I can be protected from running into a gratuitous rape scene, or animal cruelty, or... whatever I don't like being reminded exists (even if only in an author's mind).
And if it's about keeping kids from randomly running into porn... kids seldom randomly run into porn, they seek out whatever's available with incredible persistance -- if Amazon wants to create a safe site for children they might be better creating parental controls that allow those parents to let only a limited age-appropriate version of Amazon load on their child's computers and blocks *all* links to material not in children's books or DVDs.
This policy is spin. Stupid. Mindless. 'We did this for you gentle customer' spin. That really doesn't do anything useful because if I browse for the word 'filly' up comes the ratings deprived Probst book... perversion on display and all I wanted was a kid's book about girl horses!!!
It doesn't do what it says on the tin.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Spin.
Unluckily this stupid 'customer protection' spin could have, I hope unintended, potential fallout if it continues.
When a bookseller declares they won't sell books of x-thickness anymore, the publishers stop producing those books, stop buying those stories, and agents stop representing the authors who write them... Pretty soon even if people are still writing those books -- even if there are people wondering why they don't write them like that anymore -- they're not being bought and sold.
I don't want that happening with GLBT books. I don't want writers omitting GLBT characters because their book might acquire negative sales potential.
But here's where I say it's not a GLBT issue... I don't want that happening with any adult books. (And I'm not using that as a euphemism for porn... I'm pretty sure porn will always find a way.)
I don't want books being left off the Amazon ratings system because a section of the customer base complains about them being there... I don't want those books getting harder to publish. I don't want people being scared to write adult characters and adult themes because somehow they might acquire the wrong tags and end up in an Amazon 'adult' ghetto.
This isn't just about equality of sexual orientation.
As bricks and mortar booksellers come under increasing pressure from online sellers, the last thing in the world I want those new gatekeepers of the written word to be doing is using their powers (as some bricks and mortar stores have in the past) to make this kind of decision about what does and does not get offered an equal opportunity to sell (yes I know there isn't a level playing field, but that's no excuse for deliberately skewing it more against certain books) -- and if such decisions need to be made then it should be by a wider society than Amazon spin doctors and their less than intelligent algorithms.
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4:24a - I Was Going To Write...
A post about the girl and boy who walked into my brain this morning and insist that they are not just darker versions of One Night and Once but entirely different people from an entirely different story -- any resemblance to other extant ideas being entirely coincidental.
At first I thought they were post-apocalyptic too, but gradually I realised that it was a different kind of apocalypse to the usual (not that One Night and Once or Aspirin have usual apocalypses but this is one with a lot more people... more of a not-apocalypse)
And they're kind of fun to be with right now (some characters just help when I've got pain... don't ask me why)
...
Day before yesterday I got an idea that probably should have gone to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jmeadows -- YA fantasy with just a bit of Romeo and Juliet.
Looks like my idea generator is working.
...
And that would have tied in to the post I've been meaning to write for the last couple of days, about ideas... and how lots of folk round queryfail were declaring how ideas aren't copyrightable etc and mocking those who value their ideas.
Maybe I'll get around to that another day...
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6:57p - Hmmm
I love a good conspiracy theory.
http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html
But this looks more like those guys who jump up and down and claim terrorist attacks etc that they didn't do. I especially like that first we have the self-confessed troll who points people towards the idea that there's been a master criminal at work, and then we get the master criminal confessing and citing the genius of his John the Baptist (and I'd have got away with it if it wasn't for those pesky kids! -- only, of course, there's no taking a bow if you get away with it).
Troll-boy says he paid good money ($50 per person per day) to get help (well we all know those second/third world chappies work for peanuts) and used
'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
to grab the books he wanted to derank. Really? I'm entirely not any kind of coder but that doesn't look right for the results.
Also... does Amazon actually have a 'report as adult' button? Considering I've run into more than a few reviews complaining about certain books suddenly having ADULT content that they weren't expecting, I'd kind of expect those reviewers to have found the magic button and got the book removed from the rankings... only that doesn't seem to have happened. I know of plenty of PA author squabbles and I'd expect to have heard about how his function had been used during those slapfights, but I haven't. And I can't find it on the couple of pages I've looked at today -- maybe someone can point it out. Funny but no one pointed it out when I suggested tagging books inappropriately... I mean that would have been way more nuclear so I'd have expected it to come up.
And as far as I know no one knew prior to this that a complaint would remove a book from the ranking system (not from the site just from the ranking system...)
(Heck, the hoops I've had to jump through to report a mistake in a listing... )
But the bigger problem is that this can't account for Amazon replying to an author/publisher saying that Amazon's policy is to strip the rank from 'adult material' so that it doesn't appear in the site's bestseller ratings etc. Troll-boy isn't claiming to have an inside man.
[yes, it was the Easter holidays... except my dealings with Amazon.co.uk customer service have lead to the conclusion that a fair chunk of customer serive is outsourced to India, where Easter/Passover isn't that big a deal. And I'd kind of expect a pretty good team to be left watching an online shop over a holiday period because shopping online is something you're more likely to do when you're *not* at work -- I do most of my Amazon shopping outside traditional shop opening hours, if Amazon were to crash over a holiday weekend I'd expect wailing and gnashing of teeth over the lost income]
The master plan also requires that Troll-boy knows Amazon will pull the rankings from books. That Amazon will not notice a sudden upsurge in the use of a feature a regular user like myself doesn't even know exists. And that Amazon does indeed have a policy of removing books from the rankings system and not restoring them, or having a system in place for restoring them, when queried by the authors/publishers concerned.
And then it requires that the authors who have their book's rankings pulled and are ignored by Amazon to complain loudly in blogs *and be listened to* (which is not a forgone conclusion - it requires that the more influential folks pick up on the story).
Troll-boy isn't claiming collusion with any or all of the 'fag' authors, or to have been trolling the crowd.
Like the guy said... strikes me as being the plot of a James Bond movie. Otherwise known as fantasy for boys.
And while I know there are some pretty perverse minds out there who get their kicks the strangest ways... the easier way to get credit and lolz here is to hoax everyone into believing that you are very very clever and they are very very stupid... And all it would take is waiting for a wave, getting sock puppets to link in several places to a 'theory' for what had happened, normal internet paranoia with sock puppets, and a confession. Easy, and no financial outlay.
A domino topple doesn't work just because you shove the first domino... the secret is in having placed all the other dominoes so that they will push the next and the next. This topple wouldn't work (as described) unless some pretty important steps aren't being described (otherwise all you'd get is some random author's books being pulled off the Amazon best-seller listing... not being removed from sale or most searches... nothing big or dramatic or very claimable -- more your 'I got this tramp sleeping in a doorway'.)
So no, I don't believe -- not on the evidence being offered.
Sometimes the obvious answer is the obvious -- big companies make stupid mistakes trying for lazy PR wins. Or yanno, like bankers giving themselves massive bonuses when they're being bailed out by the tax payer.
EDIT: http://bryant.livejournal.com/672165.html
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