You’ve no doubt read about the big Amazon rank kerfluffle over the weekend, put in the public eye by the Twitter tag: #amazonfail. A huge number of sexually-themed and lesbian/gay/bisexual books got categorized as “adult”, and hence deranked, removed from best seller lists, and buried in Amazon’s search results. This effectively made those books invisible in Amazon. Included in the deranking, along with more hard-core titles, were Lady Chatterley’s Lover and books by Gore Vidal and Jeanette Winterson.
Amazon claims a “glitch” — an, er, “ham-fisted error,” no less — and is fixing things apparently. There has been some back and forth about what actually happened, though I think whatever the case, this infographic does the best job of describing reality.
Clay Shirky thinks we all went too far in claiming foul play, and should apologize to Amazon. Mary Hodder disagrees, and Richard Nash thinks the marginal always get the raw deal, and so no matter what, Amazon shouldn’t be off the hook.
But I think all this discussion of the how/what/whys of this particular case, though important, miss the central issue.
Amazon, Google, and What We Get to See
It’s not what Amazon did or didn’t do, but what the whole thing highlights about our reliance on a couple of companies — Amazon & Google … and Wikipedia too, now — to help us find, and then deliver to us a huge amount of our information. These companies have enormous power to make decisions about what society will and will not see.
We’ve had faith in their general decentness about using this power, about not gaming their systems, and generally working hard to provide us with the “right” search results. Still, I’ve long been annoyed that Google filters search results based on where I am searching, and, I presume, my browsing habits. When I am searching, I want to find the stuff that is most popular, not what Google thinks I want to see based on my profile. And as this story indicates, it ain’t all gravy over at Amazon either, whatever the initial cause of the problem.
Applied specifically to the book business, it also highlights why Amazon has so much power in the book space online – if your book isn’t in Amazon, it hardly exists.
An Open Alternative?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an open web-based book database/search engine that would catalog all books and point to everywhere selling them online? That would link to reviews & resources etc? That could plug into libraries catalogs as well?
Wouldn’t it be a good idea for publishing companies to get together to support such a database/engine? On an open basis? Rather than letting Amazon be the defacto search engine for books, and hence completely control online book retail space?
Amazon has done wonderful things, as has Google, but both are essentially monopolies, and history’s shown us that monopolies come with all sorts of problems.
Open Library
The Internet Archive’s OpenLibrary is trying to build an open, community-driven catalog of all the books in the world, but it’s still not really usable for people looking for books. Would be nice if it were. I wonder: are any big publishing houses supporting OpenLibrary? Other retailers? [Disclosure: LibriVox, a project which I started, is supported by Internet Archive's infrastructure to host and serve audio files].
It seems to me it is in their long-term interest to have an alternate to Amazon as the search engine for information on books. It needn’t be Open Library, but if I were the CEO of a big publisher, I would be on the phone to all my colleagues about setting up something like it. The web is going to drive more and more book sales; leaving control of book discovery to just Amazon isn’t wise business.
It’s in everyone’s long-term interest to make sure that one company, one entity, one monopoly does not control our access to knowledge and culture.
6 Comments
The Universal eBook Catalog
http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/04/universal-ebook-catalog.html
Amen! This is precisely the point I was trying to make in my earlier blog post on the subject. I think you’ve said it better than I could. Regardless of intent, Amazon (and of course Google and Wikipedia) have built up too much power, or nearly too much. Unfortunately, many retailers have adopted a “If you can’t beat em, join em” philosophy with regards to Amazon, and have decided to cut their losses and enjoy the affiliate fees. It seems unlikely, at this point, that a major alternative to Amazon will arise in the ecommerce world, at least for print books.
Ebooks, however, is a different matter. There is room for a smart company to come in and create a real competitor to Amazon on ebooks. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, when Amazon sells digital content, it loses what makes it a great retailer in the first place.
As an aside, some of the onus has to go on the consumer, too (and this applies to all of the information monopolies you note in the post). I liken this situation to the way food is produced and consumed in America. Very few companies control the vast majority of food that Americans eat, and the result is that Americans eat more and more of one single product (whether they realize it or not) — corn. Even though this is having adverse effects on both their bodies and their environment and weakening national security (if you think it’s scary relying on others for our energy, imagine relying on them for our food), most people don’t opt out of this system. Even if they don’t eat at fast food restaurants, they still tend to shop at major chain supermarkets or even wholesalers like Costco.
There are those of us, though, who have largely opted out of this system and support CSAs and local farmers markets, who strive to eat as much organic, locally-grown food as we can, and even, in some cases, to grow as much of our food as possible.
Where am I going with this? Well, as an independent bookstore trying to navigate ecommerce in a meaningful way, I hear from lots of people that we need to “adapt or die.” This is undoubtedly true, which is why we’ve changed much of the way we used to do business, and are constantly evaluating our policies and strategies to try to anticipate how people will find books in the future.
But then I think about how I changed the way I shop for food. About two years ago, I stopped buying food from major supermarkets and began shopping, every week, at the Hollywood Farmers Market. What did the Hollywood Farmers Market do to adapt that attracted me? They’d been around for years before I started shopping there, and I discovered it by driving by one Sunday morning. The answer is that they didn’t change, I did. I realized that it was important to get my food locally and to have access to fresh, natural food. In fact, it was so important to me that I was willing to spend a little more for that food. In some cases the quality of the food is superior, but not always. I’m more concerned with the ‘localness’ of the food than I am with whether it’s organic or not. Plus, you can buy organic food at most supermarkets now. In the end, I simply want mymoney to stay in my community and to help foster a community of farmers nearby that can provide me with delicious, nutritious food.
At some point, people are going to have to realize that shopping with somewhere other than Amazon is important. It’s our job to adapt and try to compete, but it’s the consumer’s responsibility to meet us halfway.
Hugh, I just posted about this on Readerville, but have you seen ISBNdb?
But who gave them power? We do–and that’s the secret sauce of the Internet: anyone can create whatever they want for everyone to see. If you want an open alternative, grass-roots it–the power is within you.
@wayne: As stated above, OpenLibrary is trying to be what I describe, but has not got there yet…I hold out hope. Brewster Kahle’s done great things in the past.
But beyond the grassroots, it seems to me it’s in publishers’ interests to tackle this search/discovery problem, rather than ceding control exclusively to Amazon.
I expect they will eventually; if they were smart, they would do it cheaply and better by supporting an open project like OpenLibrary, or something similar.
What I haven’t seen commented on is a new feature following the glitch: out your meta-tags. When you click on the protest tags, such as amazonfail, your account will be exposed. Everyone who has created these tags to protest books that were unclassified as adult, such as “Preventing Homosexuality In Children” is now completely exposed. Your full name, location, reviews, and wishlist are suddenly exposed to the world. This is a form of social coercion and control. If you say something bad about a book, people who don’t like what you say can find you. This is a full-frontal culture war on a market. People seeking “adult” literature prefer the privacy of the internet to be exposed/endangered in public. If Amazon “hides” books. they become scarce and expensive, then out of print. Whether it is intentional or not, one cannot deny their taking sides in the culture war, and the quickest way to exterminate a culture is to burn their libraries. Screw you, Amazon!