Everyone who’s been paying attention and has mere than a passing affection for freedom of speech knows that Internet culture is getting out of hand. Especially at times, it seems, in the little corner of the net inhabited by Science Fiction fans. (Perennial case being YA Twitter, of which I’ve Read more…
I wrote about the morality of fiction earlier, a couple of things I’ve read recently brought me back to the question from the another side. In that post I was talking about morality of fiction in light of the inner processes of the author. But really, when most people talk Read more…
It’s done. When the creative class itself packs their bags and calls it quits, it’s over. This is where we end. Any tyrant now knows that they can suppress any artistic expression they don’t like just by making some threats. The temptation is to retaliate. Make fun of North Korea Read more…
(NOTE: I’m going to start posting (some) political stuff on my blog again, the experiment with two blogs didn’t really work, and no one needs another political blog anyway.) Again with the asshats I say. And we have some wonderful hats of assness this time in the person(s) of a Read more…
Apparently, if this post causes you substantial emotional distress, Congress wants to put me in prison. Of course, that’s not how they characterize it. Again, we have more proposed legislation to protect the children. Which begs the question why say this, “with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause Read more…
ADDENDUM #4: Amazon has officially owned the cock up, still insisting it’s a glitch, but their poor customer relations has insured that about 75% of the public believe it’s all BS and they intended to do it. IMO is was a glitch, but a glitch in a nasty and troubling system that Amazon uses to suppress titles it doesn’t like. So this may be a good thing, as the PR backlash might encourage people to demand they remove all the de-ranking logic from their site. (After all, what’s the point when you cannot purchase anything w/o asserting you’re over eighteen anyway, unless it’s to protect the women and the servants.)
ADDENDUM #3: Amazon seems to be trying to fix this on the down low. No press comments, nothing on their site, but a little experimentation shows that rankings are re-appearing. MZB’s book from below has its rank back, as does Heather has Two Mommies. The History of Sexuality by Foucault is still SOL.
ADDENDUM #2: And Dear Author points out something that very strongly implies that whatever is happening at Amazon is happening on their own servers.
ADDENDUM: A very interesting theory brought to my attention by a tweet from Toby. Brings up other possibilities. Could Amazon have been the target of a botnet?
Again, we have an example why is it a really bad thing to have centralized distribution channels, either state or corporate. I pointed this out earlier with some e-book censoring going on with Apple’s iPhone application store. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, but Amazon has decided to follow suit, and in a much more egregious fashion. They’ve decided that if your book is “adult” enough, well, they’ll just nuke the Amazon Rank for the title and make it impossible to find via search. Quoth one amazonian asshat:
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. (more…)
Here is a nasty little side-effect of dedicated e-readers that few people, if any have addressed. In addition to any and all deficiencies they might have compared to print, we have a situation in some cases where there’s a single portal through which data flows. Apple has recently given us a glimpse of what could happen if all your media came from one source (be it iTunes, or Amazon, or whatever). Gallycat gives us the story of David Carnoy’s self-published novel Knife Music. Apparently the guy is tech savvy (he’s an editor at C-net) so he want’s to pimp an e-book version. He wants it on the iPhone. He makes it easy by embedding its own reader and putting it up at the Apple App Store.
I wanted to write a follow-up to two other blog posts I wrote back last summer. The story at that point was as follows: Sherry Jones writes The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives. She sells it to Random House. Random House sends an Read more…
According to Gallycat, the students riled up by the threat of Random House’s publication of the Jewel of Medina were planning little more than a publicity campaign to e-mail the publisher and news outlets and so on. Perfectly innocuous stuff in a pluralistic society. Which makes Random House look like Read more…
From the “this surprises you why?” department: Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance Read more…