At this point I’m willing to buy that okay, yeah, somebody might have committed a major fuckup and accidentally flipped the “adult” bit on on over 50,000 books. The problem I still have though was aptly expressed by Charles Stross over here: to wit, that there was a mechanism in place to begin with that could have this kind of global effect. Even if the intent of such a global mechanism is not initially political, it’s all too vulnerable to being manipulated for political reasons. I’m very much of the mind that instead there should be some sort of user-changeable setting that says “don’t show me items in the categories I specify”. Whatever those categories may be, adult, all-ages, or what.

I’m also bugged that there hasn’t been any real report out of Amazon as to what exactly got screwed up. It’d just be nice to, y’know, know.

And boy, that *is* discriminatory. As a librarian it makes me cringe not just because it’s blatantly discriminatory, but it is a form of CENSORSHIP.

I understand the parental need to “shelter” our children from learning too much too soon, but geez! It’s a massive Internet bookstore, and what they’re doing would be like a public library locking up their adult section behind bars. Um, hello? What people read is their business, and it’s not your place to tell them what they can and can’t read. Even children (because that’s the parent’s *responsibility* to monitor what their kids are up to).

If people are concerned what children can get into online, then their parents need to be more proactive. They need to grow up and take some responsibility for their get. Set some boundaries and actually enforce them.

It’s not *our* responsibility to monitor others’ children.

What on earth is our society coming to??