#AmazonFAIL follow-up


Links to the latest

OK, to recap: Amazon customers and authors were noticing that certain very reputable fiction and non-fiction books, most with gay themes, we no longer showing a sales rank or being found in searched. I wrote about it here.

Amazon first said it was a glitch.

Then the rumor swirled around that a hacker was responsible. Some idiot even tried to take credit.

Now they're admitting there was no hacker, just that "mistakes were made", and they're trying to fix. Bottom line is that they claim some worker in France confused "adult" (meaning porn) with erotica, sexuality etc. and re-categorized over 57,000 books.

Amazon has kind of sailed along, through bubbles and busts...anyone remember them hitting this kind of speed bump before?

Some links to check out:

Andrea James from the Seattle PI covered this pretty extensively online. You can see all related posts here.

SassyMonkey from BlogHer posts a veritable link-fest here.

The New York Times covers it here. Chief among the points in this article was how slowly Amazon seemed to respond to a pretty widespread online outrage.

OK, so maybe we give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, but let's see how quickly the find and fix every categorization error. If a dude in France can wreak this much havoc in what sounds like a blink of an eye, it seems like they should be able to fix it quickly to, no?

We'll see.


Posted: Tue - April 14, 2009 at 03:21 PM       EmailFeedback

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