Dabble.com founder Mary Hodder offered her take on the high-profile snafu in a column for TechCrunch.com, in which she argued that Amazon's "it was all a glitch" defense was bunk.
Hodder backs up her argument with vast experience in computer technology and programming. She examined Amazon's claims in light of the widespread use of algorithms on sites like Amazon to find and organize data.
"The ethical issue with algorithms and information systems generally is that they make choices about what information to use, or display or hide, and this makes them very powerful," she said. "These choices are never made in a vacuum and reflect both the conscious and subconscious assumptions and ideas of their creators."
Hodder noted that Amazon's "glitch" claim not only contradicted its initial claim that they were manually segregating all GLBT-themed books as "adult," but it also contradicts itself on technical grounds, as a simple search through Amazon's archives demonstrates.
A simple search for "homosexuality" on Amazon, according to Hodder, first returns the title "A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality," a so-called self-help book. This book, unlike hundreds of other titles, has not been moved to Amazon's "adult" section. A test of Hodder's claim holds up with a search for "homosexuality" in Amazon's books section.
Michael Musto writes a regular column about the GLBT scene for the Village Voice. He commented on the Amazon foul-up in his column, jokingly advising his readers to buy all of his books to bolster their sales ranks now that Amazon has un-banished them from the gay ghetto.
“I feel there’s no way this was a glitch,” he told XBIZ. “Obviously they made a conscious decision to label all [GLBT] themed books ‘adult’ to keep them more out of reach, while charming novels about straight serial killing and other such gruesome things were left perfectly untouched. I’m thrilled at the mass outrage that arose as a result, and I’m impressed by the power of the tweet. It seems to say ‘Tweet us as equals.’"
Word broke online last weekend about the incident, largely on the microblogging website Twitter, where the shorthand for the event was "amazonfail." The fracas started when self-published author Mark Probst noticed that his gay-themed western novel, "The Filly," had disappeared from Amazon's rankings.
He asked about it, and Amazon told him, "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude adult material from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."
