I have to be honest… I hate the whole back to school time.  Besides the perhaps not so obvious reasons… it unleashes that which I despise most on the streets of the city…

The yellow school bus.

These “Cheese Buses”, as we call them, are a a major contributing factor to the congestion levels of the city.  They stop in the middle of the block, double park, hold up traffic, and most of the time have a complete disregard for other motorists.  I’ll be honest on the fact that pretty much 90% of the accidents I’ve ever responded to that involved a bus actually involved a school bus as opposed to a city or private bus.  It can be pretty scary.

The sad part is that its really a long process to be eligible to drive a school bus.  There’s a commercial driver’s license, a 19A certification, something like 8 hours of class to attend, a physical endurance test, and believe it or not there is actually a pretty in depth background check accompanied with fingerprinting.  All of these are actually positive things considering we are trusting them with our children.  There just seems to be one glaring ommission.

The driving test.

A test on common sense would be nice… but let’s face it… the kids need to get to school somehow and since common sense seems to be in short supply… I guess we’ll take what we can get.  Still, I really wish they would give these people a driving test.

Or give the kids crash helmets.

Something is better than nothing.

Full Disclosure: I have been a customer of Amazon.com since 1997, am a current Amazon Prime Member, and am an Amazon Associate who in 2008 made $8.76 from cereal related products.

I was going to avoid this whole Amazon.com debate.  It seemed to be getting plenty of coverage, there were things changing minute by minute I wasn’t necessarily able to keep track of, and after I did my own research into it where I found there really wasn’t anything worthy of my time or effort on the matter.  That was Sunday.

This tweet came out on Monday linking to this story that had been written the day before.

This post was also made on Monday.

So let the buzzsaw begin…

The Accusation

So author Mark Probst wanted to know why his Young Adult novel with gay themes, The Filly, was stripped of its Amazon sales ranking.  He notified both Amazon and blogged about it.  His book wasn’t the only one.  In fact there were quite a few books that had their sales rankings removed that were by GLBT authors or had GLBT themes including:

• The Filly
• The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk
Rubyfruit Jungle
• Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America

And

• My Point…And I Do Have One

Now all the books listed above had their sales rankings removed.  If you click any of those links above, you will find yourself looking at exactly what I was looking at on Sunday.

I was looking at a product page where I could order the very book they were claiming the sales rankings had been removed from.

I bet you think I was mistaken, but I assure you I was not!  You see, even though the sales rankings are removed, Amazon still sold the books.  I could still find the books using the search bar.  I could still order the books.  So where is this censorship and book burning you ask???  There was none.

What Actually Happened

Where are the sales rankings normally you ask?  Well on a normal page you would find them as highlighted here in the red letters:

So the number above is that particular book’s sales ranking across ALL books.  Amazon also will provide sales rankings on books that are classified, usually by the publisher, further in their literature taxonomy.  So a book that may rank 1,000,000 in just Books can also rank 300 in the more specific Literature ——> Gay.  So these books were delisted from the genre lists.

You could still find them via a keyword search.

You could still order them and have them shipped to you.

Conspiracy Theories

Admittedly, Amazon has (of this post’s writing) not produced a solid reason why this happened other than it was a “glitch”.  They have in fact been working to reinstate the sales rankings for the books affected, including those above.  This of course has not stopped the Internet from bashing them incessantly or generating some theories:

Conspiracy Theory: GLBT Authors Self-Sacrifice

This theory is that the GLBT publishers got together and secretly tagged their books with the ADULT tag just prior to the Christian Easter Weekend.  This would do three things for them: 1) It would delay Amazon‘s response since it was a holiday weekend 2) It would allow them to once again lay blame on Right Wing Christians Groups for a wrong against them and 3) Hopefully cause a Steisand Effect because people would erroneously think the material was being censored, which in turn would boost the sales of their literature at a time when the money was much needed in this down economy

Debunked: Let’s face it, the GLBT community can’t organize for jack shit.  If they had the power to organize such an action then Prop 8 never would have passed in California.  They are way too fractured and lacking in a voice to pull this off both politically and on The Real World: Brooklyn.

Conspiracy Theory: Right Wing Christian Fundamentalists

In a move to further along the current fundamental Crusade against the “evils” of the GLBT community, Right Wing Christian Fundamentalist groups diverted teenagers from Good Friday services to stations set up in their churches around the country where they repented by marking GLBT material as “ADULT” or “OFFENSIVE”.  These God Squads would work through Holy Saturday into the wee hours of Easter Sunday when they would finally rejoice and collapse from exhaustion, leaving all the chocolate bunnies for the over 55 crowd and the GLBT community without any books to read.

Debunked: Amazon allows you to rate how many stars you give a product and write a review, but I have not been able to find a place where they allow you to mark an item as offensive or “ADULT”.  Additionally, if this was true, then there would have been a huge spike of diabetic related emergencies across the midwest.  The only increase was in the number of animal bites from rabbits and chicks, leaving the resolution of this theory in high doubt.

Conspiracy Theory: The Alien Theory

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, was abducted by aliens from the secret base in New Mexico who have allegiance to George W. Bush.  They put him through a mind altering procedure to make him think like Rush Limbaugh.  He then systematically weeded out any GLBT employee of Amazon on the coding/product/review teams and replaced them with mindless worker bees who simply tagged things they thought were GLBT related as “ADULT”.  He will eventually cocoon himself and emerge as a huge butterfly before releasing the Kindle 3 that will only download and read aloud The Book of Mormon.

Debunked: It’s not.  We’re still waiting on DNA samples from the lab taken from a glass of tea that was globbed with honey that Bezos had been drinking.  Homemade honey….

Conspiracy Theory: Hackers

It is possible that some hackers found an exploit in Amazon‘s system and decided to use it… sort of the same way that Twitter was wormed this past weekend by a 17 year old fellow New Yorker.  This exploit could have been done either externally or even possibly even internally by an employee unintentionally making a simple error, but only Amazon server logs will be able to reveal it after analysis.

Debunked: It isn’t debunked yet.  Do you have any idea what server logs for Amazon look like?  Yeah… they’re way big.  Whether it takes hours, days, or weeks though… the answer is there.

UPDATE: The New York Times, The LA Times and Wired are reporting that Amazon rep Drew Herdener has admitted it was an internal cataloging error that affected 57,000 titles, NOT just GLBT titles, and that they are fixing it.

In Conclusion

I understand what Amazon does for unknown authors and small presses.  It was Amazon that helped propel the smaller presses that publish GLBT materials to gain nationwide distribution.  I understand the importance of Amazon to these authors and publishers and that the loss of Amazon to them would mean the loss of exposure, distribution capability, and ultimately their livelihoods.  The thing is that for Amazon this is business.  Jeff Bezos is a smart and revolutionary businessman who has always been pro the “little guy”, and this change would indicate a dramatic shift in that thinking and undermining years of his own work. 

Censorship is a problem that we face.  There are plenty of examples of real censorship such as the case of Maureen Johnson‘s Bermudez Triangle being banned in Bartlesville Oklahoma as I made previous mention of here.  To falsely accuse Amazon of censorship is not only wrong but irresponsible, especially if you don’t have a basic understanding of the machinations of how it all works as MANY of these decriers have exhibited a severe lack of.

There’s nothing wrong with questioning a “policy” or a result of something that is unexpected and seemingly wrong.  In fact, as many of you may notice, I do so on a regular basis.  However before we start hurling accusations of impropriety and of acts that are against the very democratic core that we express these feelings under… we need to make sure we are properly educated in the matter.  Words cannot be irresponsibly thrown out there, and you need to own them.

If you’ve dropped the #AmazonFail on Twitter, if you’ve declared yourself as boycotting Amazon for their perceived transgression as baseless as it was, or if you’re an Amazon Associate who has sworn them off, then you go right ahead and follow up with your threats.  No, seriously, own what you have said for a change.  Even though Amazon has done nothing wrong you should keep your promises and your posturing… because you do not DESERVE the convenience, price savings, and intellectual freedom provided by Amazon.

Me?

I love Amazon… in fact I just got this in the mail Friday…

… and I’ll be using them for a long time to come…