Saturday, April 18, 2009

Amazonfail: It's Not Over Yet

Amazon has fixed some though by no means all of the problems encompassed by "amazonfail."

But as to amazonfail's being caused by a "glitch"? Unless "amazonfail" is only narrowly defined in terms of its having affected works of mainstream literature or scholarship that management probably didn't intend to censor, I profoundly doubt it. After reading Francine Saint Marie's Amazon's "Glitch" Myth Debunked, I really don't think it's possible to go on giving Amazon the benefit of the doubt. Her post begins

I am the author of the LAMBDA Notable Book, The Secret Keeping, as well as The Secret Trilogy, Girl Trouble, and several other popular LGBT paperbacks sold on Amazon.com.

All of my novels have been aggressively censored by Amazon since (at least) January of 2008, when they were first released as Kindle editions and promptly rigged in the Kindle store so as not to register any sales ranks and bestselling categories, or to show up properly in Amazon search results. I have also experienced mysterious "sourcing fees" applied by Amazon to the list prices of my LGBT paperbacks, as well as the deletion of five-star customer reviews of them, the removal of their "in stock" status, and a host of other handicapping techniques which are still in effect today.

She relates a Kafkaesque tale anyone who's tried to penetrate the shrouds of corporate bureaucracy will appreciate.

4 comments:

Josh said...

"the shrouds of"? Timmi, tell me you didn't get depressed and die midsentence! I worry.

Timmi Duchamp said...

Ooops. I'm still here, honest. I inadvertently erased the last words in the sentence while fixing a formatting problem.

T.

Josh said...

I don't know whether to believe that "I'm still here" or not: "She relates a Kafkaesque tale anyone who's tried to penetrate the shrouds of corporate bureaucracy" still don't make no sense--looks to me as if you crawled back to the keyboard to add two words but gave up the ghost before typing a verb phrase to complete the sentence. The fact that you later posted about Cameron's 2007 firing is small reassurance, as whoever from the Aqueduct Politburo is trying to maintain the illusion of your still being with us is most likely digging up old drafts from your files to post.

Anonymous said...

Curious, very curious, Josh, that you place such confidence in Timmi Duchamp's syntactical consistency. We at Aqueduct know better. If you could only see some of those old drafts!

In any case, rest assured, her absence is only temporary. She is, we swear, recovering...

Best regards,
The Aqueduct Politburo