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Amazon.com "glitch" resolved: GLBT-themed books back on sales charts
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| Amazon.com "glitch" resolved: GLBT-themed books back on sales charts | ||
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by Shaun Knittel
SGN Staff Writer Amazon.com, America's largest online retailer headquartered in Seattle, WA, apologized Tuesday for a system error that caused it to remove a number of LGBT books from its sales charts. The charts let customers know how well one title sells compared with another. On Sunday, authors who sold LGBT-themed books on Amazon.com found they'd been stripped of their sales rank. In some cases, the books were no longer available on the e-commerce giant's on-site searches. Books without rankings included those by a number of distinguished writers, including Gore Vidal, Annie Proulx, and E.M. Forster. Amazon.com officials reported the problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed," Amazon's Director of Corporate Communications Patty Smith told the Associated Press in an e-mail Sunday when the company promised the numbers would be restored. However, sales numbers were missing until late Monday afternoon. Throughout the week, Amazon.com declined to elaborate on what caused the "glitch" in the first place. The ranking removal appeared to depend on how Amazon originally categorized each book. The company excludes what they consider to be "adult" materials from some searches and best-seller lists. If that were the case then LGBT-themed books - including biographical titles - were categorized as containing adult content when they are, in fact, non-erotic. The removals quickly became a hot topic over the weekend among Twitter and Facebook users. Thousands voiced their concerns in online blogs, with many accusing the e-tailer of censorship - prompting Amazon.com to deny the move was part of a strategy to make the chart more "family-friendly." "It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay- and Lesbian-themed titles," Amazon Spokesman Andrew Herdener said in a statement made available to the press. "57,310 books were impacted in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind and Body, Reproductive and Sexual Medicine, and Erotica." Authors such as Craig Seymour would disagree. Seymour, who wrote the Gay memoir All I could Bare said in a blog Sunday, April 12, he noticed his sales rank was dropped in February, then restored nearly four weeks later after he was told by Amazon.com that his book had been "classified as an Adult product." Seymour said he did some looking around on the site and found the only books without a sales rank had Gay content like his. It would seem that "adult" material policy did not apply to Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books - a 600 naked women pictorial which remains ranked. Another book that remains ranked and somehow passed the "adult" material scrub is a biography by straight porn star Ron Jeremy. Even though Amazon maintains they are sorry for the mishap, the company's homepage lists nothing letting potential book buyers, whose purchases make up the bulk of company's profits, know that the "glitch" took place. "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering a complete selection," Herdener said. "We intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future." |
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