This surprises and offends me. I use Amazon a ton, especially since moving away from MN. For a number of years I gave a gay romance novel to a friend of mine as a gift for his birthday. After these purchases, I would get numerous suggestions in my Amazon recommended items for additional gay love stories. I never had any trouble searching for these items and I was impressed at the diversity of the gay romance offerings and that it had an 80/100 on HRC's Corporate Equality Index. So, I thought Amazon was pretty good in this area. I hate that this may have changed
( ... )
Most people I know just logged into their account and made a complaint via that.
I did find that if you book search that it's not quite as bad as if you just leave the search as "all departments"
We buy a lot of books through B&N, because people give us gift cards through them. I don't think I've bought any books off Amazon for quite a while, though I do use them for other things. But there are other places to buy those things too...
Again, I don't know if it's true or not, but there is the claim that authors have been complaining since February about this issue. I have no source for that, other than a brief glance through #amazonfail this morning, though, and there wasn't a link.
It also appears to have de-ranked feminist and disability literature. That can't possibly be an Amazon policy. Obviously they need better programmers. ;)
Here is the text of the email I got from Amazon in response to my complaint, not exactly an apology and it will be interesting to see whether everything gets "fixed" the same regardless of the content:
"Hello,
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon."
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I did find that if you book search that it's not quite as bad as if you just leave the search as "all departments"
We buy a lot of books through B&N, because people give us gift cards through them. I don't think I've bought any books off Amazon for quite a while, though I do use them for other things. But there are other places to buy those things too...
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Mostly I buy books from barnes and noble anyway.
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It also appears to have de-ranked feminist and disability literature. That can't possibly be an Amazon policy. Obviously they need better programmers. ;)
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"Hello,
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon."
Reply
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