Amazon calls removal of rankings for gay-themed books a 'cataloging error'

CHICAGO-The removal of rankings for gay- and lesbian-themed books at Amazon.com, which created an Internet-fueled uproar for two days, was all "an accident"-and not the work of a hacker or a corporate conspiracy-according to a company spokeswoman.In a statement released late Monday, Patty Smith, Amazon's director of corporate communications, said the problem resulted from "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" that affected 57,310 titles in the company's sites in the U.S. and around the globe.

While gay and lesbian books were in that group, so were books in such categories as health, mind and body, and reproduction and sexual medicine, Smith said.

The furor erupted Sunday after Mark Probst, author of a gay-themed young-adult novel "The Filly," posted an entry on his blog (markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html) pointing out that hundreds of gay and lesbian books had lost their sales rankings. Bloggers quickly jumped all over the revelation, while on Twitter, outrage over the apparent discrimination resulted in the issue becoming the site's top trending topic.

But the problem appears to date as least as far back as February, when Craig Seymour, a Chicagoan who teaches journalism at Northern Illinois University, discovered that the sales rankings had disappeared for all three versions of his book, "All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C." After some muscle-flexing by his publisher, Simon & Schuster, the rankings were reinstated three weeks later.

Smith's statement came several hours after a hacker who calls himself Weev claimed responsibility in a posting at livejournal.com. He asserted that he had manipulated Amazon's product-rating tools to flag gay and lesbian books as "inappropriate" and, as a result, strip them of their rating numbers.

Asked about the hacker's claim, Smith responded in an e-mail, "If you look at the statement, it says this was a 'ham-fisted cataloging error' by 'Amazon.' "

She said that rankings are or will soon be back on all 57,310 affected books. Amazon intends "to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future," she said.

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