Entertainment & Entrepreneurship

The Wall Street Journal reported on the accidental deletion of rankings for gay-themed books, ostensibly because of an internal cataloging mistake. As reported by the Journal, Amazon explained only briefly: "'This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection,' wrote Drew Herdener, Amazon's director of communications, in an email."

Reading between the lines, Amazon seems to have inadvertently relabeled all gay-themed works as adult material, a category for which it does not provide rankings. The same error is reported to have affected many health books as well.

The error highlights important phenomena regarding online content distribution. First is the importance rankings, and by extension, the entire editorial side of online distribution. The tracking of rankings does not reflect merely the vanity of the authors. Instead, the data provide significant sales information that authors and publishers can use to shape marketing strategies. The transparent nature of the rankings provides information on every book rather than merely one's own books. This gives every author tools that were once held by only the largest publishers.

Second, authors and publishers raise these concerns because of the assumption that readers rely on the rankings to make their choices. Shopping for books, movies or music is a highly subjective process. The cover artwork, packaging notes and reviews all have some influence on the decision to select one item over another. But into this mix comes the pressure to be "current" within our chosen genre. All things being equal, a buyer wants to select the item that everyone else in their interest group is also reading, watching or listening to. (There is another group that wants to be opinion shapers, selecting the newest works, but even here the publication data and rankings shape the selection. Rediscovering back catalog works is a much harder way to influence opinions.)

The reality of the importance of rankings tends to undermine the "Long-Tail Hypothesis" that the Internet will result in greater longer term life spans for creative works. The Internet is great at generating market segmentation, so that one's relevant rankings can be focused on lesbian autobiography, Samaritan religious theory, or quantum astrophysics without the category being lumped into a broad, general topic and lost. But newest and most popular will still apply within each category. While a consumer can theoretically find anything, the editorial tools will not send consumers into the digital stacks.

This leads to the last and most important insight from the controversy. The cataloging is an editorial process, subject to decision-making by the retailer. Amazon has elected not to provide ranking information to its adult selections. Why? Is it afraid of promoting Lady Chatterly's Lover (or its hard-core equivalent)? Walmart is known for controlling the stock in its physical stores and banning albums depending on the content or artwork on the cover of some popular bands. In the same way, the New York Times best seller list is an editorial process which excludes works like the Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare out of the results. It does not necessarily reflect sales tracking data.

There has been the impression that Internet retailers like Amazon, Netflix, iTunes and others are less involved with editorial and economic selectivity than their physically constrained counterparts. But this is not the case.

So when reading the rankings in the future, we should be careful to remember that the rankings and categories, the popularity and even the availability have all been influenced by real people.

The ham-fisted editorial mistake may ultimately be remembered the most for its brief lifting of the curtain. We have been given a glimpse of the wizard and his hot air balloon.