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This is something that happened last year it was a Saturday afternoon last spring in April it was Easter and Passover weekend and you know when authors get bored actually one of the authors who is pert of this moment is in the room as Jacqueline. You know they do things like they Google them still you know and they go to Amazon and they check their sales arraying you know and kind of you know just you know see what's going on and if you don't know Amazon Dot com the sales rank thing and how your book is selling is sort of the key to the whole Amazon system effects on how you appear in search results and you know all kinds of different things. And a lot of authors start to figure out that they no longer had a Sales Rank and then from there they figured out that their book had received a sort of mysterious adult flag and they didn't know why. And so they started posting things on Twitter and on Facebook while I can't find my book I mean it can go to the page and it's there but when I search for it it's not there my my book is kind of gone this is really strange and. Someone on Twitter

started using what's called a hash tag to collect all of the tweets in one place who knows what a hash tag is in the room. A couple of people. Oh great. Awesome. So a hash tag is just you put a little pound sign when you're typing a tweet and you. It's a way of adding a keyword to that tweet. And so that it becomes part of a larger larger conversation and that people can follow the entire thread of a conversation across Twitter and the hashtag that was chosen at this point was Amazon fail because Amazon doing its thing and fail being a really Internet snarky way of saying this totally blows. So within a few hours of people starting to post the stuff they started to figure out that there is a theme to the different kinds of books that were being in effect digitally and by Amazon. And lo and behold they were feminist sex positive books to him and they were LGBT and there were even books of sexual health books for folks with disabilities that were also had mysteriously gone missing

and gotten this adult flag while you know very hetero normative books like and products like Playboy calendars and even like you know rabid anti-gay screeds totally left alone. So you know you do what you do and you light your torches and you get out your pitchforks and you start storming on up to Amazons castle and this is crazy what's going on and you know people are tweeting about of the push in the Facebook page people are blogging and you know it's Saturday night and you know these these different Web celebrities kind of gotten involved and they started using their influence to spread the word further that this was crazy. By Sunday morning the L.A. Times is blogging about this Sunday afternoon and evening the New York Times starts writing about it and it just is turning into this giant massive thing and so Sunday night Amazon was forced to make some sort of response and it's a holiday it's a double holiday on top of it and they were forced to make a response they made a statement to Publishers Weekly which was the wrong idea but that's that's a separate story but they said it's a glitch. We're looking into it.

Right. And I was you know for what it's worth I was totally on the conspiracy you know theory like Board of things like oh my god it's hackers and they figured out the system and we're all going down you know it was crazy. So. You know now let's think about this situation if it were 10 years ago even 10 years ago in 1909 Amazon was already you know the world's most popular online retailer for books and if books had gone missing or had been banned 10 years ago how would we have dealt with that as a group. What kinds of things would we have done in 1909. We would have emailed each other and asked people to forward that around we might have written a letter to the editor which which would have gotten published some point or maybe you know try to get involved with some sort of rights organization who would then kind of create a campaign to challenge Amazon on this and ensure what would have had to have happened is that a number of gatekeepers along the way would have had to decide that this was an important

enough issue to take on or important enough story to tell. But instead 10 years later all of these warehouses from the Web kind of slipped into our cultural consciousness. And you know allowed us to demand something from a major corporation without any funding without any formal organization and without any sort of impetus or anyone telling them to do so they just did it on their own.