We've included only e-readers (and one tablet computer) that are either developed by old media companies or have gone out of their way to partner with them; think of this as a compilation of would-be media saviors dressed up as gadgets.

Maker: Barnes & Noble (the retailer)
Name: E-Reader
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble (the publisher); access to books scanned by Google Books; a B&N e-book store. (More)

Maker: Apple
Name: Apple Tablet (unofficial)
Caveat: A tablet computer is much more capable than an e-reader, usually offering the resolution, sound and video capabilities of a laptop computer along with a full-color display.
Old media tie-ins: Apple is in content talks with the New York Times, a large magazine group and at least two textbook companies, sources told our colleagues at Gizmodo. (More)

Maker:Sony
Names:Reader Touch, Reader Pocket
Old media tie-ins: Sony has a great feature that will let you check out e-books from one the oldest distribution mediums out there: your local library. Publishers can't be thrilled with "Library Finder," to say nothing of Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Oh well!

Maker: Plastic Logic Ltd.
Name: Plastic Logic Reader
Old media tie-ins: Content deals with Gannett Co.'s USA Today and Pearson PLC's Financial Times. Digital bookstore from Barnes & Noble.

Maker: Amazon.com
Name: Kindle DX, Kindle 2
Old media tie-ins: e-Books — from fiction to textbooks — sold by Amazon; a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times; a variety of magazines, including Time. Non-participating newspapers, including those owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have complained about the paltry 30 percent cut of revenues they were offered for sales on the device.

Maker: iRex
Name: DR800SG (catchy!)
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble's e-book store. B&N gets around.

And, bringing up the rear, there are the media companies whose devices are, for now, mostly talk.

Maker: Hearst Corp. and FirstPaper LLC
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: Would presumably include content from Hearst newspapers like the Chronicle-s in San Francisco and Houston and from magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan. There has been talk of a hardware device developed by Hearst and, more recently, of an open software platform developed with FirstPaper.

Maker: Time Inc.
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: There are conflicting accounts over whether Time Inc. is interested in making this device. Former Valleywag Owen Thomas of NBC Bay Area obtained a June 2009 presentation indicating plans to finish a prototype this year; Peter Kafka's sources at All Things D said the magazine division of Time Warner is interested in creating a virtual store rather than a physical device. Either way, the company is said to be seeking partnerships with other magazine publishers — Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst, according to the documents reviewed by Thomas.

(UPDATE: Added Sony Reader due to Library Finder feature.)

(Pics via Gizmodo unless otherwise noted)

The Friday before a holiday weekend is the ultimate black hole for news, and thus the perfect time to dump embarrassing announcements. A roundup:

Google: To compensate for this week's hour-and-a-half-long GMail outage, Google has given three free days of service to its paying Google Apps customers. The company wrote in an email we received last night, "We understand that this service outage has affected our valued customers and their users, and we sincerely apologize for the disruption and any impact.

Amazon: Company CEO Jeff Bezos has already apologized for silently deleting copies of 1984 off people's Kindles, but now the company has made official amends, offering affected customers either a redelivery of the book or a $30 gift certificate, the Wall Street Journal reports.

AT&T: The telecommunications company knows its wireless network is the scourge of iPhone owners, so it's just posted a YouTube video of an empathetic, long-haired geek named "Seth" to explain how hard it has been for the company to keep up with the torrid growth in smartphone subscriptions. You know what else is hard, "Seth?" Spending $100 per month for crappy service.

"We have heard you," he soothes. "We are on it." We predict a parody version of this video will be up by the end of the weekend.

(Top pic by spud murphy on Flickr)

Forbes recently authored a book on the megalomaniacs who proceeded him historically, called Power, Ambition, Glory. The book aims to teach CEOs (or CEOs-in-training) lessons drawn from history: basically, it aspires to be The Art of War For Dummies. From the tipline, Forbes is so desperate to win wars on behalf of his own ego, he had employees buy his new book en masse in order to get it on the Amazon.com bestseller list:

It's very important to Steve that he be considered a successful author and a serious scholar. So he (or someone that works for him) instructed the Forbes sales staff to buy the book - every day, several times a day, in different stores, especially when they travel, so that it will help inflate the book's sales figures. They can expense these purchases and the company will presumably write off the cost. Using this technique, they successfully got the book into the top 100 on Amazon during the first week of release, but it's flatlined since then.

Ah, yes: maybe Steve can take a cue from his own book, and remember that time Napoleon Bonaparte failed when he tried to move in on Russia in the winter, and then later, when Hitler did the same thing. Both attempts miserably failed, because they didn't know what Russia in the winter was actually like. Hopefully Forbes - while trying to move in on bestseller lists with a shitty book - won't try too hard to make the same mistake. Seeing as how his company's hitting tough times, spending the last year laying off and consolidating staffs, Forbes shouldn't any his ammo fighting battles he can't win. As we all know, the Ruskie-esque menace that is James Patterson's The Angel Experiment pulls no punches.

All but one of Bezos' reviews are five stars. The geeky retailer raves about Snickerdoodles, "amazing cheese snacks," $1,100 binoculars and a book that indulges his "dream of visiting the outer planets." Then comes the 13th Warrior, the 1999 action film starring Antonio Banderas. It is a four-star picture, according to 334 other customers, but Bezos writes that "one star is indeed one too many."

This is a terrible, terrible movie... this endless stream of uninteresting battle scenes with pointless dialogue and no discernable plot is perhaps one of the worst movies ever made. Sorry if this seems harsh, but I just don't want anyone to buy it unknowingly.

Bezos has apologized for remotely and silently deleting copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles last week. He did so via a quick internet text message, since apparently this incident was too shameful for the CEO to bust out with another YouTube vid:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

What can he say, he was preoccupied with shoe shopping and let his company go a little nuts. Happens to the most maniacal of us.

[via TechCrunch]

Bezos' video, above, was directed not at the press or even customers but at Zappos employees, who Bezos presumably wants to keep firmly in place through the acquisition and integration of the company. The CEO of Zappos, meanwhile, did his talking on the company blog.

Bezos cut out the middleman — the press, in this case — big time. And why not? Instead of having to answer boring financial questions, Bezos got to pontificate on Amazon's history, ostensible focus on its customers, and on his management philosophy. The manic laugher would never have been able to sermonize like this in the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE: And of course there's a downside, which is being mocked by the likes of Fast Company's David Lidsky. Lidsky's funny satirical liveblog of Bezos' video is here.

A publisher changed its mind about selling George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm electronically. So Amazon agreed to just go ahead and remotely delete bought and paid for e-copies of the books from people's Kindles.

Owners got refunds, but many were still not happy. Which makes sense; your local bookstore isn't allowed to sneak into your house in the middle of the night, take your books back and leave you a check. If Amazon wants to make the Kindle an iPhone for books, it's well advised to get a bit obsessive about controlling the user experience on the device, as Apple would. But this is taking things too far.

Reports the New York Times:

Unlike Amazon, which sets the retail price for its e-books and sells them in its own proprietary Kindle format, Scribd is offering publishers considerably more control over how their digital titles are sold.

Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition. Amazon sets a price of $9.99 for many popular e-books, meaning titles there might be less expensive. But Scribd will allow publishers to see what is selling and change their prices accordingly.

Scribd also gives publishers 80 percent of revenue. Amazon reportedly gives publishers about half of the list price of books sold for the Kindle, but also discounts many titles and in some cases chooses to make no revenue itself from those sales.

Simon & Schuster will sell its books with anticopying software from Adobe, which means those books can be transferred to devices like the Sony Reader and some mobile phones, but not to Amazon's Kindle.

Since it's already abundantly clear that Kindle is a false prophet for newspapers, would it be safe to assume that if more disgruntled-with-Amazon publishers were to follow suit and partner with Scribd that Amazon might be in big trouble? Because there just might be more deals in the works.

Trip Adler, Scribd's chief executive, says the company is also talking to other major American publishers. "This is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales," Mr. Adler said.

Back in May, after posting significant financial losses, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tried desperately to convince shareholders that Kindle needed to be viewed as an investment and not an income generator. How will he spin further losses? Probably with maniacal laughter!

Simon & Schuster to Sell Digital Books on Scribd.com [New York Times]

Bezos's family foundation is funding research by University of Washington professor Patricia Kuhl, whose research seems to involve putting babies in really freaky-looking scientific equipment. Will this one day lead to Kindle Nanos getting implanted in their ocular nerves at birth? Will their brainwaves be mined to determine today's specials on Amazon.com? With Bezos looking more and more like Dr. Evil with every passing year, the mind boggles. But he already knew that.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the dilettante scion of a fading newspaper-family dynasty, obediently showed up to announce a trial in which his company will subsidize the $489 retail price of a Kindle DX for readers who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Times or the Boston Globe — assuming the latter is still publishing, since he's threatened to close it down.

The Kindle DX is a fair-looking device — homely in the way that every gadget not made by Apple inevitably is, but passably designed. But will it save newspapers? No. And Bezos is hedging his bets, even as he has managed to scare the press lords into shelling out their precious remaining cash into funding the distribution of his pricey e-reader. Today, he hawked the Kindle DX as a means for reading textbooks, sheet music, novels, and science journals. Newspapers are just one checkbox in a long list of features — and yet he's cajoled the gullible likes of Sulzberger into handing him a pile of cash.

And it's not like Amazon needs the money. It's a steady cash generator — especially for Bezos himself. On Friday, he sold $63 million in Amazon shares. On Monday, as news of the Kindle leaked, he sold another $16 million. If he's such a big believer in supporting journalism, why didn't Bezos announce he was personally giving away 160,000 Kindles to people who agreed to sign up for a newspaper subscription? He could afford it.

(Photo by Gizmodo)

Did we say "kindled"? Amazon's Kindle, the e-book reader, has indeed sparked fever dreams among the ailing lords of print. The New York Times has paused from chronicling its own doom to contemplate its salvation — a large-format Kindle, better suited to displaying newspaper-like pages. Hearst, News Corp., and other print-media concerns are pushing their own devices, loath to grant Amazon so much power over their future — but they are fumbling, while Amazon may introduce its newspaper-friendly device as soon as Wednesday.

What a petty concern to worry about, rather than asking if that future even exists!

The argument for e-readers goes like this: Newspapers and magazines will once again be able to charge for subscriptions to support the cost of production, while shedding the expense of printing presses. Readers will pay for the convenience of getting the news delivered to a device.

That prediction fundamentally misunderstands the lessons of the Kindle, which made books available in a convenient digital format, on an appealing device, for the first time. Downloading five books for the beach is vastly more appealing than packing them.

What are the publishers really proposing? Taking a product available for free on the Web, dumbing it down, and then charging for it. News without links, comments, or video, in black and white, updated once a day? In an age when print media ought to be learning to do more with less, they are instead fixated on getting customers to pay more for less.

There is one prospective market for this: The old, who may be so attached to printed media that they will accept an electronic substitute. Hearst digital chieftain Phil Bronstein, the former San Francisco Chronicle editor, told Maureen Dowd that the industry's best hope was that people would live longer, so those trained to read newspapers will stick to the habit.

The obvious converse of Bronstein's feeble hope: The young will never learn to read newspapers and magazines again, having grown up reading online. Why would they switch to a product like the Kindle?

Like the libertarian wingnuts who would rather flee to science-fiction cities on the sea, escape to outer space, or cosset themselves in an online fantasy world rather than live in reality, the addled lords of print like Bronstein would rather dream of a technological rescue than face the hard work of survival.

What newspapers and magazines need to do is obvious: Build appealing websites, and sell them better. But that would require changing.

In 1987, a teenage girl in suburban New York was discovered dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag, smeared with feces, with racial epithets scrawled on her torso. She had been attacked by half a dozen white men, then left in that state on the grounds of an apartment building. As the court case against her accused assailants proceeded, it became clear that she'd actually faked the attack, in order not to be punished for running away from home. Though the event initially triggered enormous moral outrage, evidence that the event didn't actually happen didn't reverse that outrage. Moral judgment is harder to reverse than other, less emotional forms; when an event precipitates the cleansing anger of righteousness, admitting you were mistaken feels dirty. As a result, there can be an enormous premium put on finding rationales for continuing to feel aggrieved, should the initial one disappear. Call it ‘conservation of outrage.'

A lot of us behaved like that this week, in our fury at Amazon. After an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes lost their Amazon sales rank, and therefore their visibility in certain Amazon list and search functions, we participated in a public campaign, largely coordinated via the Twitter keyword #amazonfail (a form of labeling called a hashtag) because of a perceived injustice at the hands of that company, an injustice that didn't actually occur.

Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can't write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren't true. As bad as that was, though, far worse is the retrofitting of alternate rationales to continue to view Amazon with suspicion, rationales that would not have provoked the outrage we felt had they been all we were asked to react to in the first place.

When trying to explain one's past actions, hindsight is always 20/400. With that caveat, I will say that the emotional pleasure of using the #amazonfail hashtag was intoxicating. There is no civil rights struggle in the US that matters more to me than the extension of equal rights without regard for sexual orientation. Here was a chance to strike a public blow for that cause, and I didn't even have to write a check or get up from my chair to do it! I went so far as to publicly suggest a link between the Amazon de-listing and the anti-gay backlash following the legalization of gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont. My friend Nelson Minar called bullshit on my completely worthless speculation, which was the beginning of my realizing how much I'd been seduced by righteousness, and how stupid it had made me.

I was easily seduced in part because the actual, undisputed event - the change in status of LGBT-themed work on Amazon, while heterosexual material and anti-gay tracts kept their metadata intact - fit a template I know well, that of the factional use of a system open to public access. Examples are legion; one recent one was the top positions enjoyed by issues related to the legalization of marijuana on the Change.gov site. (Though I am in favor of the legalization of marijuana, I also recognize that the Change.gov results were an outcome no representative poll of the American people would have returned.) Seeing the change in status of LGBT books, I believed, vaguely, that Amazon was hosting and therefore complicit in a systemic attempt to remove such material from public discussion.

Here's how stupid that belief made me. I have been thinking about the internet as hard as I can for the better part of two decades, and for the latter half of that time, I've been thinking about the problems of categorization systems, and it never occurred to me that the possible explanation for systemic bias might be something having to do with a technological system instead of a human one, that a changed classification in the Amazon database could trigger the change in status of tens of thousands of books.

I assumed (again, vaguely) that Amazon themselves had not adopted an anti-gay posture, and I recognized the possibility that this might be a trolling attack, but the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me. This isn't because I am a generally stupid person; it was because I was, on Sunday, a specifically stupid person. When a lifetime of intellectual labor and study came up against a moment of emotional engagement, emotion won, in a rout.

Many people I love and respect disagree with me on this point; Mary Hodder in particular has written a very thoughtful case for why we should still regard Amazon as culpable and as a target for outrage. I don't disagree with her interpretations of what Amazon did wrong (and I am using her as a particularly eloquent spokeswoman for a whole class of post-#amazonfail arguments) but I do disagree with her conclusion.

If we wanted to deny Amazon all benefit of the doubt, and to construct the maximum case against them, it would go something like this: it was stupid to have a categorization system that would allow LGBT-themed books to be de-ranked en masse; it was stupid to have a technological system that would allow that to happen easily and globally; it was stupid to remove sales rank from sexually explicit works, rather than adding "Safe Search" options; it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters; it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid, yes, all true. If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations. Those are good conversations to have, we need to have them, but they are not conversations that would enrage thousands of people in the space of a few hours and kick off calls for boycotts and worse.

Intention is what we were reacting to, and the perception of intention matters, a lot. If you hit me with your car and kill me, the effect on you could be anything from grief counseling to being convicted of murder, and that range of outcomes would rest on a judgment about your intentions, even given the same actual event.

So it is here. Whatever stupidities Amazon is guilty of, none of them are hanging offenses. The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began. Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act. Amazon would love to avoid those problems if they could – who needs the tsouris? - but they can't. No one gets cataloging "right" in any perfect sense, and no algorithm returns the "correct" results. We know that, because we see it every day, in every large-scale system we use. No set of labels or algorithms solves anything once and for all; any working system for showing data to the user is a bag of optimizations and tradeoffs that are a lot worse than some Platonic ideal, but a lot better than nothing.

We know all that, but we're no longer willing to cut Amazon any slack, because we don't trust them, and we don't trust them because we feel like they did something bad, even though we now know, intellectually, that they didn't actually do the bad thing we've come to hate them for. They didn't intend to silence gay-themed work, and they didn't provide the means for groups of anti-gay bigots to do so either. Even if the employee currently blamed for the change in the database turned out to be a virulent homophobe, the problem is in not having checks and balances for making changes to the database, not widespread bias.

We're used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don't like that kind of upset, we're at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.

We shouldn't let that happen here; conservation of outrage is the wrong answer. We can apologize to Amazon while not losing sight of the fact that homophobic bias is wrong and we have to fight it everywhere it exists. What we can't do, can't afford to do if we want to think of ourselves as people who care about injustice, is to fight it in places it doesn't exist.

The only thing anyone can agree on was Amazon.com PR's complete mishandling of the situation, once people noticed that gay and lesbian books were getting marked as "adult" titles, which Amazon.com omits from its sales rankings and search results. Top flack Patty Smith didn't do much better with her latest excuseplanation:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for checking in. Best regards -
Patty

In other words, it happened and they're fixing it. That's worse than nothing. So here are the rumors that have crossed our inbox:

Blame France! An Amazon.com alumnus tells us this story about "how it went down":

guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up "adult", which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like "erotic" and "sexuality". That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon. The [customer service] rep thought the porn question as a standard porn question about how searches work.

It's the Conficker worm! A source who claimed to work at Amazon.com told me that internal logs revealed a massive wave of automatically created accounts shortly before the incident, apparently using machines infected with the Conficker worm.

We don't have concrete evidence that it was Conficker, but a few days before the incident, there was a mass registration of accounts on Amazon. We're talking MASSIVE. I don't have an exact number, but from the regions the accounts were registered from, it looked like it followed a trend. There were quite a few from India, eastern United States as well. According to my coworkers who have done more research into it, the regions that the registrations were from followed a strong trend with the regions that Conficker has most affected.

The hacker did it. That brings us back to the claim by Weev, a well-documented website prankster, that he's responsible — a claim which Smith, the Amazon spokeswoman categorically denies. ("No," she said, in response to a series of direct questions asking if Weev was involved. Smith is quite possibly the least verbose director of corporate communications in the world.)

In his detailed explanation of how he allegedly pulled off the stunt, Weev says he hired third-world workers to break Amazon's "captcha" security, which displays a random set of numbers and letters in an effort to block hackers who attempt to mass-register accounts using scripts. Might he have hired a third party which then used a Conficker botnet to create accounts which then flagged gay and lesbian books on Amazon as inappropriate? Or is this all part of an elaborate attention-getting stunt to take credit for an Amazon employee's mistake? Either way, it's a masterstroke to tie together the month's two big Internet memes.

The hacker, known as Weev, with whom we've had dealings before the "amazonfail" episode, is saying that the whole escapade was the result of his exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools.

What to make of people who don't want to believe this was a prank? They're left with the notion of Amazon.com pursuing homophobic censorship, which must be pleasing to people who see evil behind every "Inc." Pick your conspiracy theory: Someone's playing someone.

A recap: On Friday, two gay-themed romance novels disappeared from Amazon's sales rankings — they were still listed on the site, but could not appear on best-seller lists. On Saturday, hundreds more vanished. Writer Mark Probst asked Amazon.com customer service what happened, and got this answer from an "Ashlyn D." in customer service:

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.

Twitter users started decrying the move en masse, tagging their posts "#amazonfail" and accusing the online retailer of homophobia. Amazon.com PR didn't help matters by calling the problem a "glitch." Even though the sales ranks of most gay and lesbian titles had been restored, Twitterers taunted Amazon.com by posting messages with the tag "#glitchmyass."

Glitch my ass, indeed. One LiveJournal user speculated that the mass flagging of gay books on Amazon.com might be the work of organized antigay groups — or troublemaking hackers:

Now, let's just put ourselves in Amazon's shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist.

Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as "adult" content? Why would this happen over a weekend?

Our hacker has an explanation: Amazon.com has long had a mechanism that allowed customers to flag a product as "inappropriate." Only a small number of these votes were needed to get a book off of Amazon's sales rankings.

What Weev says he figured out was a way to trick Internet users into automatically flagging products without their knowledge, with the help of friends who run high-profile websites. He also says he hired "third-worlders" to register fake Amazon accounts and flag books. (His full explanation of the stunt is below.) He hasn't yet offered proof that he carried off the prank as described, but one part checks out: Amazon.com has apparently removed the feature that lets users flag books as "inappropriate." And the scheme he details seems far more likely than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos deciding to become a censor.

The hacker's confession, which he also posted on LiveJournal:

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

Weev has attracted at least one doubter who had trouble following his instructions, saying the code doesn't work. We asked him to answer the critique. He says he believes they were using a different version of a software program called "elinks," and that Amazon has disabled the site feature in question.

In the meantime, you can follow this clusterfuck, 140 characters at a time.

Amazon issued a statement to Peter Kafka of All Things Digital and some other reporters, reading:

"We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible."

The online bookseller now needs to explain why a temporary glitch "recently" discovered has been affecting gay-themed novels going back to at least early February, when (as we noted previously) former gay stripper Craig Seymour saw the sales ranking on his memoir disappear even as Diablo Cody's stripper memoir retained its sales rank. Seymour complained at the time and eventually resolved the issue, so it's not like Amazon didn't have warnings of the problem before this weekend.

Amazon also needs to explain how said glitch appears to have systemically targeted "hundreds" of gay romance books and autobiographies over the past two days while leaving so many similar straight books alone.

The company will no doubt try to do that without reminding its homophobic customers that it is selling hot man-on-man and woman-on-woman and whoever-on-whoever purple prose for gays to read and do lord knows what else at the same time. Better start working on the statement right now if you hope to put it out anytime next week.

Previously: These Books Too Gay for Amazon

UPDATE: Former Amazon.com gay and lesbian studies editor Ron Hogan now works at GalleyCat as senior editor. He raises doubts there about Amazon's "glitch" excuse, pointing first to Seymour's experience in February and then to the fact that Amazon originally called this a "policy" decision (see here) before contradicting itself and calling it a "glitch".

Straight romance like Jackie Collins and straight porn like this book of Playboy centerfolds is still ranked on Amazon.

But not the homosexul stuff: Gay romance publisher Mark Probst noticed hundreds of such books lost their rankings over the past two days, including Transgressions, about a 17th century liaison between a cavalry trooper and a farmer's son, and False Colors, about a 19th century naval lieutenant attracted to his commanding officer.

Probst wrote to Amazon through his publisher's account, and was told

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.

There is now an full-fledged Twitter shitstorm, naturally, and a new, snarky definition for the term "Amazon Rank," spreading virally. It's hard to imagine the Seattle-based retailer sticking by this controversial policy after naming a gay Brit's novel their "Book of the Year."

On the other hand, Amazon must be happy, on some level, to have finally expanded its customer base beyond the sophisticated techno elites, straight through into the American cultural backwaters where this sort of material is remotely offensive, somehow.

So probably the store will lump anything vaguely sexual, Jackie Collins and Playboy included, into a romance/erotica category, which will also be rank banned. And eventually the site will just throw in the towel and outsource its entire filtering operation to the cultural arbiters at Wal-Mart. Why not?

UPDATE: Author Daniel Harris wrote in to add some examples of non-romance books that have been banned from Amazon's rankings:

Three of my four books have been stripped of their ranking: Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (a gay history book but with chapters on pornography and S/M), A Memoir of No One in Particular (one chapter discusses my life), and Diary of a Drag Queen. Only my one "secular" book, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, retains the right to be ranked.

And Craig Seymour, whose gay stripper memoir you may remember for its mention of blogger Matt Drudge, blogs that his bio was banned from rankings back in February, even though Diablo Cody's straight stripper memoir wasn't. The good news is his ranking was eventually restored. The bad news is he noticed the memoirs of two gay porn stars were rank-banned while straight porn stars retained their rankings.

As tough as it is to lay off 215 workers, Bezos is betting he'll have reason to laugh (and laugh and laugh) maniacally for some time to come.

Sure, start scoffing. But Digg's past acquisition talks with Current and News Corp. failed in part because they looked at Digg as a media play, and community-generated sites like Digg aren't particularly attractive to advertisers. More recently, Digg and Google got close to an acquisition. That deal fell apart, according to a source familiar with the talks, because Google wanted to closely probe the quality of Digg's engineering staff early on in the deal, and Digg did not relent until talks were well along. (Digg CEO Jay Adelson refused to comment on the company's talks with Google.) The lesson: Digg's not a media company, and not a technology company. It's something else altogether.

Who makes money off of online community? The surprising answer is Amazon. One study suggests that Amazon.com makes $2.7 billion — billion! — a year in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews. Amazon uses the simple mechanism of asking shoppers if a review was helpful to rank its reviews.

It's remarkably similar to Digg's option of "digging" or "burying" a news story. Where might that be useful? Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. In addition to selling digital books, Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the Web. Magazine and newspaper editors are delusionally optimistic that they might be able to charge by the article on a device like the Kindle, through a scheme of micropayments.

Micropayments have been technically possible for more than a decade. The problem has always been consumer behavior: How do you know if an article is worth paying for? The time spent pondering that question isn't worth the nickel people hope to charge for it.

But what if you didn't have to ponder that question? What if you knew, through Digg's rating system, that a large number of people had read the story and given it a thumbs-up?

An Amazon-owned Digg wouldn't have to charge for access to its website or the stories it links to; indeed, that would be against its interests, since the rating activity on Digg requires free access to work. The Wall Street Journal even gives Digg users free access to its stories so they can read them and vote.

Instead, Digg would charge Kindle users for a new service which delivers a personalized newspaper to the device — a service far quicker and simpler than the cumbersome process of going to Digg.com and scrolling through endless lists of popular headlines. They'd only pay for the stories they read — which in turn would provide more valuable feedback on what Amazon can charge for. The payment would be essentially voluntary, since readers could always pull up publishers' websites and read the stories for free there — but they payment would be more for the simplicity and ease of use, rather than the content itself. (Arguably, that's why people pay for music on iTunes rather than download it from file-sharing networks.)

Is Amazon.com thinking about such a move? We haven't heard anything about talks between Amazon.com and Digg. But, intriguingly, we heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a personal investor in Twitter. Presumably, the attraction would be the same: getting some kind of real-time pulse on what people are interested in.

But Digg's focus on headline voting and Amazon's push into news distribution make them seem like a better match. Will Bezos dig the idea?

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Why is a cable company dabbling in the e-books business? Aside from running Discovery, Hendricks has long played at being a part-time inventor. In 1999, he and two co-inventors filed for a patent, granted in 2007, on an "electronic book security and copyright protection system" which included "a portable book-shaped viewer is used for secure viewing of the text."

Sounds like Hendricks might have a case against Amazon.com, whose Kindle is widely viewed as the first e-book reader with commercial promise. But why does he care? The answer may lie in another patent Hendricks registered, which describes a system for transmitting e-books over "video signals" — an apparent reference to cable-TV systems. Discovery styles itself as a "nonfiction media company." Either Hendricks fears Amazon getting a lock on the nonfiction market. Or perhaps he's just wasting corporate resources to bolster his reputation as an inventor.

Television has been distracting people from the written word long before the Internet came along. And while the Internet has been good for reading, it's mostly encourage the consumption of short-form writing.

Print is a much better way to read long chunks of text — fewer distractions, easier on the eyes, portable from room to room, etc. — and to the extent the Kindle replicates these technological advantages, it is basically a crippled laptop.

But Granger imagines an e-reader that advances beyond the "crude" Kindle. He thinks better technology will do the trick:

... as electronic readers improve, as they add graphics and design and, eventually, color, even more people will opt for the more sustained, contemplative experiences more often. And all will be well with the world.

What he forgets: The Kindle has a built-in Web browser, though few people use it because the Web is not particularly attractive in black-and-white. If it adds color, won't people inevitably use it to read websites, and thus fewer books, just like they do on PCs? There goes Granger's theory out the window.

We suspect he has another reason for touting the Kindle, though. Hearst, the owner of Esquire is working on its own e-reader. By paying the Kindle such a backhanded compliment — right idea, wrong device — Granger is carrying water for his publisher's business interests. And not for the first time.

Hearst has invested in E Ink, a Cambridge startup whose low-power screen technology is used in both the Kindle and Hearst's planned reader. E Ink appeared on a splashy, Granger-praised Esquire cover last year. Perhaps this E Ink-stained wretch has even handled the product he envisions killing the Kindle? If so, it's too bad Granger won't tell his readers how much he loves that, too.