Regarding amazonfail

For a quick summary, read cleolinda's LJ. Between that entry and some of the links in the comments, you'll get a good idea of what is going on.

For real-time tracking, try http://amazonglitch.com/ but it's moving awfully fast.

Personally, I logged in to my account and sent a polite yet firm e-mail (while signed in) to customer service that:

1) I am outraged at the information that has recently come to light about their rankings and search criteria in regards to "adult" material and in particular in how these labels are applied to works with homosexual characters or content

2) I understand that they are a private company and that they can apply any filters to their content that they wish.

3) However, I will not be making purchases with them until I am assured that their content is free of anything resembling censorship.

No ranting, shouting, or i'll-never-speak-to-you-agains, just an "I've shopped with you before, and I'm upset at your policies/glitches/whatever and I'm not going to shop there again unless this changes".

Now we wait - I suspect there are some rather frantic meetings going on over there right now...

So what if it is a troll

the leading theory seems to be that the fact that a troll exploited amazon's ranking/delisting/flagging system which is why this whole clusterfuck blew open over this past weekend.

However, I think copperbadge has said it best:

This is very true, and I think we will see more of this in the coming days, especially if the new theory that this is trollery and exploitation of Amazon's classification system is confirmed. At that point, Amazon is not to blame for the reclassification, but rather for the apparently standard practice of removing user-designated "adult" books from their bestseller lists.

Then it becomes not about homophobia or sexphobia but about restrictive practices and bad ethics. Amazon has a legal right not to sell a book, but refusing to sell a book or promote it as it should be because of its thematic content is a business practice that I cannot support.

Translation

What Amazon says “We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We’re working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.”"

What Amazon means "We have no idea what happened, and out e-mail system just exploded."

You can't make this shit up!

Now they are blaming the French!

"Well, more like user error--some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between "adult" and "erotic" and "sexuality". All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get the situation."

Still doesn't make sense with the Feb info but it may be part of the story.

plausible but not complete

The following message is beginning to go out to those who complained via e-mail directly to Amazon. (thanks aedifica for posting, also see several of my earlier links for others who have received the same message):

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Amazon.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.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.


Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

Given some of what has been going on, this is certainly plausible to me and while an earlier respoinse would have been nice I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this. Sort of.

See, this addresses the "why THESE particular books were misclassified as 'adult'" issue well - they weren't supposed to be.

****and while I was writing this, I received the exact same message from them. This was my response:
Thank you for your response - I had hoped that most of this was an honest mistake.

However, once the mis-categorzation issue is resolved, will you continue to implement this "policy" that authors were informed of as early as February? (That 'adult' works are not ranked/listed). If this is the case, I would like to see a clear statement from Amazon as to exactly what criteria are used to make this determination, and if there is an appeal process.