After an entire day of leaving its customers in the dark as to why many gay books had been stripped of their sales rank and removed from site searches, Amazon.com offers this not-really-apology-or-explanation:
Hello,
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.
Twitter is still atwitter. See: GlitchMyAss.com.
Check this earlier post for all the developments of what happened on Sunday.
Nothing that’s come out of Amazon has been quite believable, and that unapologetic statement doesn’t help. I can see why the tone leads many to think roughly translated it means something like:
“We got caught. We carry so much crap we can usually hide favoritism or censorship better than this. We removed way more stuff than you noticed, but all stuff the faithful would rather you not think about this Easter weekend. If we put everything back all at once you’d know we were lying, so we won’t. Next time we’ll work harder not to get caught. Stop bothering us, but keep spending your money here.”
After a few days you think they could have worked up something a little more specific and also express that they regret not just how it made them look but how it upset so many customers.