Amazonfail passed me by because I believe in Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I'm more willing to believe in a huge and humiliating cock-up than I am an internet retail giant intentionally alienated potential buyers. Amazonfail was most definitely a cock-up. It became such a big deal because the internet has an impressive ability to disseminate partial information and cause widespread knee-jerk reactions at a rapid rate. And as usual with these things, the eventual resolution doesn't receive nearly as much attention as the early angry backlash. In short, Amazonfail frustrated me in part because it was a significant gaffe, but also because of the foolish online response.
But what Amazonfail did do was make me more aware of Amazon's failings. And Amazon is full of them—not huge "fail"-worthy blunders, but smaller little problems that are no more excusable. Part of Amazonfail was that their censoring system was poorly implemented, blocking the wrong books because they'd been tagged the wrong way.
Amazon is full of algorithm errors and little mistakes which are inexcusable for such a big corporation. Example: Check out
my Amazon tags. See how some tags, like comparative religion, fairy tales, and not recommended turn up twice? There are two ways to enter a tag, by typing it in or by using a "click to add" suggestion, and Amazon sorts these two options into two different tags. The only way to fix this is to manually erase and reenter tags via identical methods. This doesn't affect individual book listings but it sure is silly—and makes it difficult to sort user reviews by tags. Example: Check both the editorial reviews and user reviews for
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Collection: Fifteenth Annual Collection. You'll see these reviews span various volumes from the collection's history, making many of them reviews of completely different books which are useless to potential purchasers of
this volume.
The underlying problem behind Amazonfail was Amazon's decision to censor book listing and search content. It spiraled out of control from there, but the center of the spiral was the underlying issue: I'd argue that any censorship which not user-approved is simply in poor taste. If I'm aware and can opt out (or, preferably, opt in) of the censored filtering, that's acceptable. But it's offensive when any other entity deems itself responsible for restricting the content I see based on its own subjective judgement as to whether that content is "appropriate" and
not tell me it is doing so.
And in little ways, Amazon still is censoring content without informing its userbase.One of the characters from
Let The Right One In is a pedophile—which is his primary motivation and one of the major aspects of the book's climax. But Amazon won't let me tag the book with "pedophilia." Book tags can be used to browse books that share the same tag, and they affect search results (only producing results, never preventing them). No, pedophilia isn't a pretty subject. But searching pedophilia, looking for books that contain pedophilia, does not a pedophile make. Indeed, the only thing it indicates is that the reader is interested in reading books which contain pedophilia—for any number of reasons. But it doesn't matter either way. Why the hell does Amazon have the right to make it more difficult for a user to find books with that content? Especially without disclaiming to their audience that they do so? It's not beyond their rights, it's probably not all that unusual, but it is a violation of trust: trust, that the company I use is impartial as to the products I find and buy.
All in all, Amazon is a gem—really, it is. I consider it the first source information on and reviews of books, and it's easily accessible, well-priced, and (because it's not a brick and mortar store) provides access to an incredible range of books, including small novels and publishers. The store has so much going for it, and yet it's burdened by so many stupid little things. Horrific tagging, mediocre searching, imperfect listings for multiple imprints or volumes in a collection—but I'd have to say that worst of all is instances of still-hidden censorship. Is it as huge a blunder to prevent users from tagging a book with pedophilia as it was to prevent users from searching for books with any homosexual content? Of course not. But that doesn't make it any more excusable.
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