Grrrrr

[firecat]

I'm a member of audible.com and they sent me a $10 gift certificate, so I went in search of $10 audio works to download. I decided to look in "Science" and I am now looking at The Bible Cure for Autoimmune Diseases in which "Dr. Don Colbert offers a natural, scriptural plan for your complete recovery from autoimmune disease."

Now. I don't diss faith healing per se (the placebo effect is mighty, after all, and I've done shamanic healing, although I'm not claiming it cured anything physical). But WHAT IS IT DOING IN THE 'SCIENCE' CATEGORY? The only kinds of faith healing books that belong in the science category are books about how and why it works.

Some of the reviews are amusing. I like the one that says "Not nearly as good as 'The Bible Cure for Gullability', which is very direct in its theme of blaming the victim for their lack of faith" and the one whose title is "We need a zero star rating." (Unfortunately, you have to buy and download the book to review it.)

ETA:

To audible.com's credit, they responded to my complaint within 15 minutes:

While I was unable to find the specific book you mentioned I did notice a few books that shouldn't be in the Science category. I apologize for this and will be notifying the content department to begin a review of the listings to ensure they are all accurately categorized.

It will be interesting to see if they follow up.

My complaint was:

I was looking in the Science category of your site and discovered books titled "The Bible Cure for..." It is clear these are books on faith healing, which may work for some people but is not science. Why are these books in the Science category? I notice these books have very poor customer reviews, and their inappropriate inclusion in the Science category might be causing this since customers buying these books out of this category may have expectations that the books can't deliver.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

What probably happened is that the person who set the categories for the book with the book publisher's company included "science" along with other categories (like "faith," "health," whatever), and when audible.com got the download, they automatically used the publisher's categorizations without double-checking. I'd bet that most companies have to do this; they generally don't have enough employees to check everything that comes down the pipe, and book publishers/distriutors/whatever are notoriously - unreliable about portraying books honestly, if they think it might influence sales. I'm just surprised that none of the people who downloaded the thing bothered to follow up with a complaint. Well, maybe they have... the response to your message to them should clear up that bit.

[firecat]

Perhaps. Amazon doesn't have it classified as science, but perhaps they pay more attention, or have already been corrected.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

*nod* I know for a fact (heh) that Amazon has a pretty good customer feedback system; if something is misclassified (as happens fairly frequently, pretty much like I outlined above) and a customer notices and pings back, Amazon can change the listing very easily. And Amazon has a huge customer base, so it's more likely to get noticed more quickly.

[elainegrey.livejournal.com]

I recall, too, that someone was describing a process (Desired? or implemented?) where Amazon was using customer feedback to rate the many different streams of publisher and reseller data about books so they'd have preferences for vendors based on track record.

Since it seems that copy catalogers care even about which librarian made a record that they were considering copying, i thought that to be a pretty cool way to scale that up.