Apr. 12th, 2009 at 9:23 PM
- Please don't call Amazon customer support, today, at least. It's Easter Sunday, (as the BBC puts it, "the most important festival of the Christian religion). The poor schmucks stuck on the phones KNOW about amazonfail and they can't do a damn thing about it.
- Googlebombing is fun: enough bloggers and such link to a certain page with the same text, and it shows up in the Google (Yahoo/Live/whatever) search for that term. Link to the smartbitches redefinition of Amazon Rank, and it
will beis first in the search results. We've done it as of 3 AM GMT April 12th:-) - Glitches do happen, and this may well be one. I don't think that Amazon did this on purpose, exactly. I am sure that their sales ranking rules are convoluted, and change hourly, because people try to game the system and get their books higher in the lists. So. Someone somewhere equated "gay and lesbian" with "adult", it could have been an exec, it could have been an overworked coder -- we'll probably never know. What a mess. Intent may not matter, they've ended up disrespecting a whole raft of people and not acknowledging and fixing it fast enough.
Alternatives to Amazon: Local Indie Bookstores, Powell's Books, Borders, Barnes & Noble. Always good to have business diversity, choices, and good old free-market competition.