Academic

Amazon Book Suppression. Censorship? No. Scary? Absolutely.

By Dan Filler

As Slate and the LA Times Jacket Copy blog both report, Amazon has pulled a tricky little maneuver to reduce the profile of a number of its...adult?...gay?...controversial?...titles.  Amazon continues to sell all manner of books, but certain titles are no longer included in its sales rankings.  It turns out that by deleting them from the rankings, they will not only be deleted from best-seller lists (even if they are in fact best sellers) but they also will become harder to find in searches.  They will quite literally be supressed, though not actually eliminated.  What books have received this management?  Paul Monette's 1992 National Book Award winning Becoming a Man.  Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality Part I.   Larry Kramer's Faggots, naturally.  And Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown.And that's just a start!

Author and blogger Mark Propst, who discovered this nonsense and outed Jeff Bezos and his crew, received this note in response to his inquiry:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.  Best regards, Ashlyn D

What's scary about this isn't the disappearance of the books.  They're still around to order if you're in the know.  It's that stumbling about for books is part of both the joy of book shopping and the way that books (and ideas) get discovered.  This decision by Amazon,  initiated without any public notice, foreshadows the way that management of internet content by private companies...like, say, Google...could quietly shape the dissemination of ideas and, consequently, the iterative production of knowledge within society. 

No surprise, controversial ideas seem the most likely candidates for this sort of knowledge massage.  I have to wonder if these sorts of creative approaches are already being employed by American Internet companies doing business in places like China.  It would give them cover in the U.S. - nobody could complain that they're complicit with foreign censors - while functionally solving problems. You might even call it a free speech work-around.  Working around the free speech problem, that is.

Image: a cheery book about bodies and sexuality that Amazon chose not to de-rank.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 13, 2009 (boomark / email).