Amazon Calls Mistake ‘Embarrassing and Ham-Fisted’

Because there’s so much attention to this, I’ll offer spokesman Drew Herdener’s comments unfiltered: This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay and Lesbian themed titles — in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind and Body, Reproductive and 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