On the Internet, criticism runs freely, in great quantities AND in great speed. Yesterday (and continuing today), Amazon changed its search mechanisms in some fashion (debate is ongoing as to whether this is a technical mistake or policy choice) such that all lesbian, gay etc (LGBT) materials lost their Amazon Sales Rank (i.e. an indication of how well the item is selling at Amazon) were relegated to “adult” and made much more difficult for users to access (might have still be been possible, but much much more difficult). You can watch the issue being discussed on Twitter; at this writing, there have already been more than 3000 Tweets (i.e. Twitter posts) on this in the past 24 hours. From what I can see, this was first noticed on Twitter and that is where much of the discussion continues to take place. That’s not all though; there are signs that works on disability and sexuality (including research works) are being removed as well. NPR also has an interesting article on this: Amazon Learns A Painful Lesson About The Twitter Hashtag.

Yet more evidence that cataloguing, databases and search is far from a neutral, technical issue. Of courses, librarians have long known this – it is first year library/information school material. In the case of Amazon, two large historically marginalized groups of people had works about them effectively suppressed on one of the world’s largest bookstores. This should serve as a lesson that searching in one place alone is never a good strategy. Further, one needs to learn something about the goals of a given database or catalogue. If selling to a broad market (and avoiding “offence”) is important, then certain cataloguing rules flow from that. If you cannot find popular books or fiction in an academic library catalogue, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Likewise, if you can’t find the most recent, cutting edge scientific research through a public library, that just means you should keep looking eslewhere. If you are looking to buy, don’t limit yourself to one place. Sadly, this advice doesn’t help authors (and others involved in the publishing industry) since Amazon plays a big role in the market and those people may well have taken an economic hit as a result of this.

Ah, there is news that this whole mess was caused by a clerical error in France. Interesting! I wonder if this would have happened if a librarian was working on the system rather than a clerical worker. There was much discussion of boycotting Amazon as punishment for this mistake – I wonder if that will still happen now that the reason behind the problem (i.e. error rather than censorship, so it appears) is apparent. The clerical error claim is still under dispute however. In other context, I read a blog post between an author and her editor which claims that filtering of such “adult” material is being driven by the company’s poorly thought out effort to maximize profits and minimize profits in Walmart style.

This whole event fascinates me and I could comment on it on several more angles still. As I wrote this entry, dozens more tweets with the hashtag #amazonfail occured – clearly the company’s various explanations have not ended discussion on the matter. Alas, I still have a great deal of academic work do and must continue with that.

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