[Harry!]

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20090414...r-6323e80.html

An "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error" has been blamed for making thousands of books impossible to find on the Amazon sales website.

The online retailer said a "glitch" was also responsible for removing 57,310 titles from Amazon's sales chart and promised it would be sorted out as soon as possible.

But the company's apology came amid allegations of censorship as many of the affected titles involved gay and lesbian material.

Craig Seymour, author of All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington DC, said he was told in February that the book's sales ranking had been removed as it was considered an adult publication. He said it also failed to appear if the title was put into a search.

"I just want fairness," he wrote on his blog. "If my homo book is labelled adult, then straight equivalents, like Diablo Cody's stripper memoir, Candy Girl, should be labelled adult. Also, I believe that any book should be searchable from the Amazon homepage or else it's ridiculous to claim, as Amazon does, that you're 'building earth's most customer-centric company'."

An Amazon spokesman called the deletions 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. 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."

Rankings have returned for many of the books, including Seymour's, but sales numbers were still missing for books including Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life and Gore Vidal's The City And The Pillar. Vidal said: "What kind of a childish game is this? Why don't they just burn the books? They'd be better off and it's very visual on television."

Author Jeanette Winterson, whose book Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit has now had its rank restored, told the Guardian: "I hate categories anyway. I think they are unhelpful, but if Amazon are making a value judgment here, then that's more serious and obviously that needs to be addressed."

[Sticks]

I have tried looking for the books in question on the Amazon site and I can find them ok, so what am I missing here?

[Harry!]

Originally posted by Sticks
I have tried looking for the books in question on the Amazon site and I can find them ok, so what am I missing here?

Money to pay for them in the credit crunch.