Amazon Fail, Monday morning edition

Amazon says "It's a glitch!" But doesn't apologize or clarify or make any attempt to assure customers this won't happen again.

Why calling it a glitch is failboat.

GalleyCate senior Editor Ron Hogan was the Gay & Lesbian studies editor at Amazon from 1998 to 2000. He posts some serious questions about the situation.

Quoted from rm:
# Annoyance that people got up in arms about this because obviously it wasn't going to turn out to be as nefarious as it seemed.

Public outrage is the Stick of Efficiency. Accidental bias is still bias and still creates a problem. This matter getting public attention in a manner that was largely civilized was useful. If it hadn't gone down this way, authors affects would still be trying to sort this out with Amazon a month from now, as demonstrated by several cases of books that were affected by this nonsense as early as February.

Being passive or silent even in the face of "accidental" bias is just as lame as condoning it.

The Guardian reports on it

Oh how I love it when a company says "it's policy" only to waffle later and declare no such policy exists!

I'm removing my Amazon wishlist, and I would like to state for the record that I will not buy anything from Amazon until the situation is rectified. For me, that means a public apology for allowing this to go on for months, for pretending like computers just up and do crazy things to embarrass you and for behaving as some customers/writers/artists are less worthy than others.

(I'm so deeply annoyed that we purchased our new Roomba through Amazon this past month. Ugh.)

WTB one functional PR department

Amazon tells GLAAD it will fix the 'glitch'

Amazon calls 'glitch' embarrassing mistake

My absolute favorite quote, from Mike Daisey:

Q: What was the reaction like inside Amazon today? Did your sources give you any insight into the mood?

Daisey: People were complaining inside that the best explanation PR could come up with is "a glitch", because that just sounds stupid, and leads to paranoid ravings. You pay the PR folks, you'd think they could say something a little more full-bodied than that.

Right on. I find myself utterly baffled when a company, especially a large well known Internet company, fails so hard at public relations. I worked a government job, and even their media relations department was more on the ball than Amazon's.

So let's assume this is all the result of technical errors - it's insensitive and stupid to let this run amok for months without getting to the bottom of it. If this had occurred and all books about people of color were affected, or Judaism, or abortion - would the response be the same? Did not the epic racefail mess last year and this year teach us that even tiny things take on significance in someone's eyes? That someone may say or do something they don't mean to be offensive and still end up being offensive?

In other news, my computer died. I was just telling Mike that whenever I contemplate a large purchase, something breaks. Right on the eve of the Ulduar patch too. So tomorrow I need a new video card. we visited the theme park of furniture shopping, IKEA, to look at shelving options. I like going on week day evenings because it is so much less crowded than weekends.