Also if you search Twitter for the hash tag glitchmyass there's a great feed being updated with new information.
Dear Author does some interesting research, as well.
Like I said, the explanation doesn't make much sense to me, but it doesn't make much sense to me either that a whole corporation would, what, try to advance the cause of curing homosexuality (?) through a way where they were sure to be caught and receive tons of negative publicity. If I had to guess, I would say that what they said in the e-mail to Probst was true - erotica results were coming up in searches of unrelated materials and people were complaining, so they tried to find a way to filter the results and the script they wrote cast way too wide a net.
I should stress here that when I say "guess," I do mean "guess." That's not what I believe happened, necessarily, and that goes against what they said in their "glitch" explanation (or part of it, anyway). And I should also say it's not that I trust corporations to make good or moral decisions or that the people in them don't have their own opinions. But I can't see a major corporation with stockholders deliberately making a decision that actually hurts them financially, let alone one that uses simple bigotry as the sole motivator, so I'm using that explanation as an example of something that would make a certain amount of sense of all that's happened.
Got am apology from Amazon, here's what they sent:
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
I also saw that Weev is trying to claim credit for it as a troll, which I think is complete bull. As I said in Feminists, that guy would claim credit for God if he could.
snidebot
Berkeley, CA
October 2005
APR 13, 2009 02:59 PM