Amazon’s Policy on the Word “Asshole:” They Can Say It, We Can’t

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The No Asshole Rule is officially released on February 22nd, but copies are already appearing in various places (Maureen, thanks for your report that Barnes & Noble has some and is displaying them). As I noted before, Amazon has been shipping for a few days. But there is a pretty weird twist at Amazon. It turns out that, although they are not censoring the title in their advertising, BUT if you want to mention the title on The Amazon No Asshole Rule page, they will reject your post — whether it is on their product forum (as I’ve done) or in a review (thanks Kent and Leslie). In fact I got a note from a reviewer who had sent in in his review, but it never appeared even though he got no feedback from Amazon about why — but he eventually figured from reading Kent’s review (which mentioned the Amazon policy) that it was probably because he had mentioned the name of the book.

I had three quick reactions to this: 1. My first reaction was to be annoyed because they won’t allow reviewers to mention the name of the book that they are selling and they mention and because at least one thoughtful person had taken the time to write a review, and it had apparently disappeared in ether; 2. My second reaction was to realize that, although the policy doesn’t quite work for this book, that Amazon has a zillion books and they can’t make special policies for each book, as the inefficiencies would cost them a fortune (and have to be passed on to us — they have small margins); and, finally, 3. I realized that the entire thing is pretty silly and I was taking it entirely too seriously, and one cost of writing a book with a dirty title is that these kinds of things are going to happen, and I should just laugh about it — but try to let people know why their comments on the forum or reviews might not appear.

P.S. Another weird thing about Amazon is that they still list The No Asshole Rule as #2 for pre-orders among Business and Investing books, even though it is shipping. I guess that is because the official date is still about 2 weeks off.

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5 responses to “Amazon’s Policy on the Word “Asshole:” They Can Say It, We Can’t”

February 10, 2007

Peter Clayton

I had a similar problem when I interviewed Stanley Bing for my podcast. His book, “100 Bullshit Jobs and How to Get Them” put me in the “adult content” section of most podcast networks, was listed as 100 B****** Jobs on iTunes and the review I wrote for Amazon was never published. BTW, his books are published by Collins.

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February 10, 2007

Bob Sutton

Peter,
Great story. And it is pretty funny given, for example, that I just put the word “asshole” into the iTunes search engine and 139 songs came back, most with A******, but the last was Arscholch (Asshole in German). It also reminds me of a little note that I added to an earlier post about my weird — but consistent –experiences that I have had with the Wall Street Journal’s aversion to the word “sucks” in both 1988 and 2006. To repeat my conclusion to a post about my experience with the WSJ Cubicle Life Column (which I think is fantastic,by the way):
P.S. I was amused to see that the Wall Street Journal editors elected not to print my assertion that working for yes men “sucks,” they censored it by printing “s—s.” It didn’t even occur to me that “sucks” was an offensive word until I thought about it for awhile. Then I remembered that this isn’t the first time I have had that word censored by the Wall Street Journal. The first time that I was quoted in the Journal was in 1988, and the article (about how irrelevant much management research is to real world problems) ended with me saying “I’ve been in the real world. It stinks.” I was misquoted; I actually said “It sucks.” I guess they won’t be printing the name of my next book, The No Asshole Rule!

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February 11, 2007

Kent Blumberg

Amazon is apparently not alone. I reposted my original review of your book on my blog on Friday, Feb 9. Although it appears on my blog page just fine, it has yet to show up on my Bloglines or Google subscriptions to the blog. Wednesday’s post is there, as is Saturday’s. The book review, however, isn’t. So Feedburner, or someone in the blog subscriptions chain, doesn’t allow “the word” either.
Kent

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February 11, 2007

Wally Bock

Two quick comments.
As far as I know, Amazon never lets people know when they don’t publish a submitted review. I know this has happened with reviews for my books.
This whole “the computer is wise and will protect us from evil automatically” thing on Amazon reminds me of when I had a client who is a breast cancer advocate and spam filters blocked her newsletters because they used the word “breast.”

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April 22, 2007

STANLEY C GARDINER

I tried to post this review at Overstock.com, but apparently they include the title of the book in the profanity scan. To dodge censorship, I abbreviated the contentious term: AH.
The review:
God bless Bob Sutton. That he has navigated through the process of tenure at a famous research institution, and is still a nice guy, speaks miles of this man’s character. This one book by itself is worthy of a lifetime achievement award. It is a life-saving book. The title alone is so powerful. Sutton has objectified the AH. His 24 question ARSE test is definitive. Once the AH is objectified, it can inflict less subjective pain: “Oh, that’s an AH. I can tell because that is AH behavior. Perhaps, now I will place my attention on something more interesting.”
I notice that a reviewer (at Amazon.com) has taken offence at the term. How telling. I notice that in another review he shares his analysis of nose hair clippers. In contrast, Sutton’s book has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.

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