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Amazon.com Search Results Shock Grandmother Shopping for Books
She was looking for a book for her granddaughter and pornographic books popped up in her search
Martha Welter was searching for a book for her teenage granddaughter on Cyber Monday when her search lead her to adult content.
A Chicago woman’s recent search on
Amazon.com for books for teenaged girls turned up scores of pornographic
books. And now -- more than two weeks after she first alerted Amazon
to the problem – the books have still not been taken down, the Unit Five
Investigative Team has found.
It was November 26th – Cyber Monday –
when Martha Welter logged on to Amazon to shop for books for her four
grandchildren for Christmas. She’s a frequent Amazon shopper and has
kept up a tradition of giving books to her grandkids. “For some reason
I’m always able to find books that they really like,” she says.
Welter found a book for her
eight-year-old granddaughter, then her ten-year-old grandson. She then
set out to find a new book for her 12-year-old granddaughter.
Starting at the Amazon.com home page,
she refined her search from “All” items to just “Books”. Then she
typed “teen” in the search box, and clicked on one of the auto-fill
terms that popped up: “Teen books for girls.” Then – because she wanted
to choose a recently-published book, Welter clicked on “New Releases –
Last 30 days” in the left-hand column.
“I go through the first page, and
that’s fine,” she says. She finds such books as "Throwing Like a Girl,”
and “Pretty Little Liars.”
“And I go to the second page, and
there I find adult picture books,” Welter says. “Adult, pornographic
picture books. I can’t even say the name of them.”
Most of the titles can’t be mentioned
here, either. Some of the milder are “Sexy College Girl Enjoying
Herself,” “Hot Asian Girl,” and “Wild Beach Night.” Most are listed on
the Amazon site as “adult picture books” – each with a banner over a
suggestive photo saying “Look Inside!” Inside each “picture book” are
more photos of women, along with an offer to download the entire picture
book onto a digital device for a small cost – or borrow for free.
And it’s not just a few books. In
the total of 140 books featured on Amazon as “teen books for girls”
released in the past thirty days, Unit Five counted 91 graphic adult
picture books – nearly two-thirds of all the search results.
“I was speechless,” Welter says. “I
just could not believe that this was happening. So right away I’m on
the phone to [Amazon] customer service.” She says Amazon
representatives promised to follow up on her complaint.
“I wait until three days have gone by,” says Welter. “Those books are still there. I kept on e-mailing.”
And on Friday, four days after
Welter first alerted Amazon to the search results, she got an e-mail
from the customer service department, which read, in part:
Hello,
From your message, I understand that you have seen some Pornographic books in recent releases of books for teen girls.
I appreciate you taking the time to share your opinions about website information.
We introduced this feature so that individuals using our web search feature would be presented with the opportunity to discover related items of interest.
I’ve passed your message on to the appropriate people in our company.
“I don’t think anyone I was corresponding with actually went and did this search to see what I was finding,” Welter says. She eventually wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and a few days later she got a reply from a representative in Amazon’s Executive Customer Relations department.
“She told me I was searching wrong,” Welter says.
In part, the woman told her:
In part, the woman told her:
The adult themed books you saw were a result of you clicking on “Last 30 Days” which moved you outside of your current search results. To see the newest titles within your current search results, you can use the “Sort by” feature which is in the upper right hand corner of your search results page.
“So I did that, and they still popped up,” says Welter. Unit Five followed the same directions spelled out by the Amazon representative, and still found the adult books.
Welter wrote back to the
representative to let her know the adult books still appeared. She has
not heard back – and more than two weeks later the books are still
there.
“What concerns me about this is that
young people can go on Amazon.com – you don’t have to prove that you’re
18,” says Welter. “They can’t go in an adult book store. They should
not be able to find this stuff so easily online.”
So how is it happening? Unit Five
found that the books are being uploaded through Amazon’s Kindle Direct
Publishing service, which Amazon advertises online as “the fast and easy
way to self-publish your books for sale in the Kindle Store.” Amazon
even offers a video tutorial on how to upload a book and list it on
Amazon’s website.
And these days it’s hard for any
company to curate what is posted to its site, according to Howard
Tullman, president of Tribeca/Flashpoint Media Arts Academy in Chicago,
and an expert on web-based media throughout the internet. “”It’s
totally the Wild West,” he says. “Anything goes; anything can be
published. The truth is, the volume of everything that is going on the
web is beyond human capabilities to edit or review.”
Amazon does issue “Content
Guidelines” for what it allows to be published. “We don’t accept
pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts,” the
guidelines say. “What we deem offensive is probably about what you
would expect.” Amazon adds that “we reserve the right to make judgments
about whether content is appropriate and to choose not to offer it. We
may also terminate your participation in the KDP program if you don’t
adhere to these content guidelines.”
Unit Five repeatedly contacted
Amazon.com by phone and e-mail about Welter’s search results and Unit
Five’s findings, but so far Amazon has not responded.
Welter says she would describe
Amazon’s attitude towards her complaint as “dismissive.” “No one that I
had contact with seemed to have any concern that this was happening,”
she says.
But she is still hoping to hear from
the company. “I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know where else
to go with it,” says Welter. “I would hope that somehow they would get
the message and somebody would actually look at this. I can’t imagine
that they would be doing this intentionally.”
