Amazon fail update

[rogin]

Looks like this is really turning into a pretty deep mess for amazon.
I was just checking the site and then to see if some books I care about have gotten their ranks back (happy to report a lot of them have), then I tried "homosexuality" as a searchword again to see if it still turned up only those crap books about healing gay people. Turns out the "Parent's guide to prevent homosexuality" is still on top, BUT is now equipped with pictures of the KKK and a swastica.

If amazon was really responsible for the censorship in the first place they certainly deserve the PR nightmare they're having right now, but if this came from abuse of the rating system it's going to turn the place upside down in the worst way.

I kind of liked the customer rating system and with all it's flaws (like reviews of genre haters on genre books) I still found it very informative and found features like fotos of the products very handy most of the time. Now the site is probably going to be trolled from all sides.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

It's a shame if they got trolled, a real PR nightmare.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure they did get trolled, after all the latest statement said it was a "ham-fisted cataloguing error", implying that maybe an employee messed up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/14/amazon-gay-sex-ranking

Hard to say what really happened, but it looks like now trolls from all sides are coming to amazon to throw rating bricks at each other.

[trialbymagic.livejournal.com]

I did want to comment on your other post, but I wasn't too sure what had actually happened.
I did a read up on it, and if it was on purpose (which for some site publicity, you never know, a lot more people are going to be visiting amazon.com) shame on them.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

The internet id full of the affair at the moment, isn't it?

I can't imagine that amazon staged this for publicity though, imho either this was completely failed attempt to make their bestseller lists more "family (aka christian fundamentalist) friendly" or someone trolled /hacked their system.

I'll just refrain from buying anything there until they come up with a reasonable explanation/apology. It was Easter after all and a company of this size might need a while to react.