So, Amazon recently delisted thousands (over 57000 to be precise) of books from their search and sales rankings. The Wall Street Journal carries the story, as does the Irish Independent (here), The China Post (here), ComputerWorld (here), the BBC (here)…. and there are many more. In the Twitter-sphere and BlogSphere, this issue was tagged as #AmazonFail. (some blog posts on this can be found here and… oh heck, here’s a link to a google search with over 400,000 results). There are over 13000 seperate Twitter posts about it, including a few highlighting alternatives to Amazon.

We have previously covered Amazon IQTrainwrecks here and here. Both involved inappropriate pushing of Adult material to customers and searchers on the Amazon site. Perhaps they are just over-compensating now?

It appears that these books were mis-categorised as “Adult” material, which Amazon excludes from searches and sales rankings. Because the books were, predominantly but not exlusively, relating to homosexual lifestyles, this provoked a storm of comment that Amazon was censoring homosexual material. However books about health and reproduction were also affected.

Amazon describe the #AmazonFail incident as a “ham fisted” cataloguing error which they attribute to one employee entering data in one field in one system. One commentator ascribes the blame to an algorithm in Amazon’s ranking and cataloguing tools. And a hacker has claimed that it was he who did it, exploiting a vulnerability in Amazon’s website. Continue reading →