From the Wall Street Journal:
Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says in a statement: “GLAAD has reached out to Amazon.com and they indicate this was an error, so we expect to start seeing evidence of its correction immediately, and any loss of visibility of gay-themed books as a result of this error will be made right by Amazon … When people learn about the lives of gay and transgender people and the common ground we share, the culture changes and advances. It is so important that stories about the lives of our community are available, and that companies like Amazon promote these titles in an equal fashion.â€
Which sounds like excellent news. Hopefully things will be back to normal in a day or two.
um – yeah, right, a mistake. OK I believe that…
Well, it is a mistake on someone’s part. That is, I don’t believe that this is something that Amazon’s senior management ordered. The mistake may have been inadequate supervision of junior staff, or inadequate supervision of an automated process, or failure to test new software properly before releasing it, or something else. The important thing is that they apologize and fix it.
While it appears that fixing is going on behind the scenes (I’ve seen some de-ranked books re-ranked), it does not appear that apologizing is going on out front…
I suspect it may be a bit chaotic in the Amazon offices right now. Probably the Board wants to see everything that goes to the public. And the PR people will be fielding calls from newspapers all over the world.
So sad to hear about censorship; again!
If Amazon doesn’t follow through, please send us information on who we should contact at Amazon to express our regret!
Thanks, Robert