Jake Widman
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 04:20
Business IT -
Technology
Page 1 of 2
The removal of gay-themed books from Amazon's sales rankings was apparently the result of a hacker manipulating Amazon's complaint mechanism.
The delisting was first noticed by author
Mark R. Probst , who noticed that lots of gay- and lesbian-themed books -- including one of his -- had lost their Amazon sales rankings.
Amazon's initial explanation was that "adult" material was excluded from sales rankings.
The question for Probst was why all gay-themed books seemed to have been suddenly caught up in the "adult" category, even if they weren't sexual in nature.
Word spread quickly once book critic Bethanne Patrick tweeted about it, and the hashtag
#amazonfail quickly became one of the top Twitter topics.
The news was picked up by gay and mainstream media alike, who besieged Amazon with question about why the company seemed to be targeting such books regardless of their actual content.
Amazon eventually issued a statement blaming the de-rankings on a "glitch" that they were working hard to correct.
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