Amazon blames removal of gay-related books on 'ham-fisted error'
by Jennifer Whitehead, Brand Republic 14-Apr-09, 09:30

LONDON - Amazon has said that an internal cataloguing error lead to thousands of books written by gay authors, as well as titles relating to sexual health and erotica, being removed from its sales rankings.
Amazon was severely criticised for the move over the Easter weekend, as the news spread across the Twittersphere and among bloggers, who dubbed the move "Amazon Fail".

The retailer was accused of censorship in relation to the removal of books by authors such as Stephen Fry, EM Forster and Gore Vidal from the rankings because they were reclassified as "adult titles", which do not appear in the rankings or main search.
More than 57,000 titles were affected.

Amazon has subsequently said that it was due to a cataloguing error and not because of an attempt to make the website more wholesome, as had initially been thought.
In an email, Amazon's director of communications, Drew Herdner, said: "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
"It has been misreported that the issue was limited to gay and lesbian-themed titles -- in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as health, mind & body, reproductive and 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."

However, there are also claims by a blogger on LiveJournal that he caused the glitch with a few lines of code, outlined in this post.
The blogger claims it was revenge for people censoring personal ads he had posted on Craigslist seeking women to take heroin with him.
Amazon said many of the titles had now been fixed and that it would implement new measures so that "this kind of accident" was less likely to happen again in the future.