Amazon fixes LGBT book ban, explains the glitch

Amazon appears to have fixed the "glitch" that caused hundreds of books with LGBT themes to stop showing up in general Amazon searches. Over the weekend a number of people noticed that the LGBT titles were missing, and the problem was traced to the fact that the sales rankings for these titles was hidden, which prevents them from showing up in all but the most specific searches.

Amazon claimed that the problem was a glitch, but thousands of people posted opinionated messages to Twitter using the tag #AmazonFail.

Now Amazon has started to respond. First, the company says, over 57,000 titles were affected and they weren't all titles that dealt with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered themes. Some were "erotic" titles, while others dealt with health issues.

It appears that the problem can be traced to a single employee of Amazon's French web site who mistakenly flagged a number of categories as "adult." The error spread out to the entire Amazon network.

Tags: amazon, amazonfail, lgbt, news