amazonfail

[ursula]

I'm guessing a lot of you are receiving this e-mail right now:

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

Comments

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they'll ever fully explain what happened.

[ctseawa.livejournal.com]

of course not. This is the cult of Bezos, er, I mean, amazon we're talking about.

[ursula]

NPR was saying that books that had been user-tagged with certain tags (including "lesbian") were wholesale marked "adult".

[elfreda.livejournal.com]

I wonder if anyone got fired, or should have but didn't?...

[freewaydiva.livejournal.com]

Maybe they got put on "Administrative Leave."

[tejolote.livejournal.com]

That's good news!

[glowing-fish.livejournal.com]

I like, let a day go by and missed some new bourgeois cause de celebrity.

[ursula]

Et les aristocrats, ils n'épelent pas tres bien.

[minkoflove.livejournal.com]

I'm not really worried about this one...I mean, the effect was bad. But this just looks too much like a stupid bug, like regular expressions gone awry. It reminds me of the time I was working for the health-based dot com, and I accidentally told every man taking the men's health test that he had erectile dysfunction...slipped right past our QA department.

[ursula]

Right, but it's a stupid bug that sat around for months and months as individual writers & small publishers complained, and took an internet kerfuffle to prompt action.