Amazon Finally Speaks: Benefit Of The Doubt?
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Just hours ago we posted “Amazon Fails Gay Readers And Writers, Reclassifies GLBTQ Books As “Adult“. Amazon has done itself a huge disservice. They never got in front of this story, there’s not even a mention in Amazon’s own “Amazon.com Virtual Media Room“ which is a huge surprise given they are not an old company that takes weeks to make a change. Nevertheless, after their claimed “glitch”, here are more details from  Amazon, via seattlepi.com:
“This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.”
Essentially, supposedly, some guy flubbed and didn’t do his job right.
“A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up ‘adult,’ which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like ‘erotic’ and ‘sexuality.’ That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon.”
No one realized his mistake for well over a month, and so lots of cash and customers have gone away. The feeling I get from hundreds of comments I’ve read all over the Internet is that AmazonFail is the newest outrage to hit America, The National Organization For Marriage is probably happy that all those Twitter “suck it @NOMtweets” tweets have been replaced by lots of “f*ck you, amazon!”. Alas, there are still many people who believe it was a hacker.