Associated Incidents
One hacker even tried to take credit for the incident, writing on his blog that he had taken advantage of bugs in Amazon’s Web site to trick people into flagging gay-themed books as inappropriate. Thousands of Twitter users included the tag “#amazonfail” in their messages on the subject, pushing it onto rankings of the most popular topics on the site and drawing in other users.
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Some affected books started appearing in searches, with sales rankings restored, by early afternoon on Monday.
Sales rankings on Amazon are important to authors because they help place books on the Web site’s best-seller lists and help shoppers find them. Many of the affected titles disappeared from basic searches so that, for example, a search from Amazon’s home page for “E. M. Forster” did not turn up “Maurice,” Forster’s classic novel about a homosexual relationship. Nathaniel Frank, the author of the well-reviewed “Unfriendly Fire,” said he could not find a link to the hardcover edition of his book last weekend.
Word of the problem started spreading across blogs and Twitter on Sunday after Mark R. Probst, the author of “The Filly,” a gay western romance for young adults, posted on his blog that several gay romances, including his, had lost their sales rankings on Amazon. Mr. Probst e-mailed Amazon and got a reply that said the company was excluding “ ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best-seller lists.”
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Probst said he was giving Amazon the benefit of the doubt. “I believe it was an error,” he said. “I don’t think it was anything malicious they were trying to do.”
But other authors were unconvinced that the changes were caused by a simple glitch.
“There are mistakes and there are mistakes,” said Daniel Mendelsohn, an author whose memoir “The Elusive Embrace” lost its sales ranking over the weekend. “At some point in this process, which I don’t understand because I’m not a computer genius, the words gay and lesbian were clearly flagged, as well as some kind of porno tag. I say, do I want my book in anyone’s mind to be equivalent to a porno? And the answer is no.”
Mr. Mendelsohn pointed out that books like “American Psycho,” a novel with sexually and violently explicit content, did not lose its sales rank. He teamed up with others affected by the problem, including the playwright and author Larry Kramer, to start a petition to boycott Amazon. As of Monday afternoon it had attracted more than 18,000 names.
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Mr. Kramer said on Monday that he was willing to shelve the boycott for now. But in an e-mail message he wrote: “I don’t think for one second that this was a glitch,” adding, “We have to now keep a more diligent eye on Amazon and how they handle the world’s cultural heritage.”
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Several publishers whose books were affected, including Simon & Schuster, the Penguin Group USA and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, declined to comment. Calls to a Random House representative were not returned.
Christopher Navratil, publisher of Running Press, a division of the Perseus Book Group, said in an e-mail message that his company had been in touch with Amazon to make sure its books were “ranked fairly and appropriately.”
At least one author said he had encountered malfunctions in his sales rankings on Amazon as far back as February. Craig Seymour, an associate professor of communications at Northern Illinois University and the author of “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.,” a memoir, said his book had disappeared from most searches for several weeks but was restored in late February.
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In a blog post late Monday, Mr. Seymour wrote that Amazon’s statement was a start, but not sufficient. “It does not explain why writers, like myself, were told by Amazon reps that our books were being classified as ‘adult products.’ ”
Amazon said in the statement that it planned “to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.” It did not elaborate on its statement.
Even after it explained the scope of the problem, Amazon continued to face criticism for its slow and limited response to the online blowup, particularly at a time when sites like Twitter can so easily accelerate and amplify a public outcry.
“Frankly, it’s surprising to hear that Amazon, which was a pioneer in the digital space, would miss this opportunity to react in real time and to manage this