#amazonfail explained in a flowchart

Posted on April 14, 2009 by

See it in full effect.

Inspired by Anatomy of the #AmazonFAIL protest.

About these ads

About Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship

Blogging Censorship is where National Coalition Against Censorship staff weigh in on the censorship issues on their minds.
This entry was posted in Sarah Falcon: Author and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to #amazonfail explained in a flowchart

  1. Pingback: Sexerati | The inevitable #amazonfail infographic

  2. Pingback: Blog Snog (04-17-09) | Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between.

  3. Pingback: Amazon Fail @ Blogging Censorship « Fremdlesen

  4. Pingback: #amazonfail and we’re not done yet: links and perspectives « Liminal states

  5. Lee Rowan says:
    April 19, 2009 at 10:59 pm

    Your flowchart is great – but it’s missing a few steps between the tag removal and the Twitter response.

    In the time between the tags being pulled–at which point most books that had been high on Amazon’s charts in glbt fiction vanished (my own among them) and the outbreak of #amazonfail, several members of a gay historical writing group to which I belong (The Macaronis) was attempting to get some explanation from Amazon. Only one, Mark Probst, got anything but a canned response (he was able to contact them as a publisher; the rest of us were merely authors.) The email he received confirmed that detagging was Amazon policy.

    At this point, several members began contacting Lambda Literary and other gay groups and publications. At about this same time, Twitter exploded with #amazonfail.

    It was not the detagging but the email to Mark, stating that the tag removal was a matter of Amazon policy, that prompted writer Erastes to initiate the Petition Site petition asking Amazon to rescind its policy of de-tagging “adult” books. (the petition now has nearly 27,000 signatures.)

    As far as I know Amazon has not even acknowledged that their policy of taking items out of sales ranking is what created the problem. Whatever triggered the mass detagging — algorhythm, glitch, or hackers, it hardly matters — there are a good many writers who see the policy as the real “amazonfail.” If Amazon is selling an item, it ought to be ranked.

    A number of tech-savvy folks have suggested that Amazon replace the ‘adult’ tag system with an opt-in/opt-out system, allowing their customers to decide what they want to see, not allowing anonymous strangers to block access to books they personally object to.

    Until Amazon sets an objective set of rules for “adult” material and/or allows customers to choose what they want to browse, Amazonfail has not been resolved..

    Reply

  6. Pingback: Blogging Censorship

  7. Pingback: Liminal states :: Calls to Boycott Amazon over Wikileaks: #amazonfail 2.0?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s