More on the whole Amazon debacle

Most people aren't buying Amazon's "Glitch" excuse. The whole mess created a firestorm on Twitter. It started as #amazonfail and graduated to #glitchmyass. The resulting furor has caused a public relations nightmare for the gigantic etailer.

With all the shouting, it's been hard to make sense of it all. Jane does a pretty good job of pulling it all together.

Point 1: This is not a one-off mistake. According to a post at Teleread.org, books with sexy content have been targeted by Amazon before. Craig Seymour, author of “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.,” was deranked in February. When questioned about this, Amazon claimed that it was adult content being intentionally filtered out. On April 10, 2009, Mark Probst, noticed that Gay romance authors Erastes and Alex Beecroft’s books from Running Press were deranked. On April 11, 2009, hundreds of GLBT books, including Probst’s own book, The Filly, were deranked. Amazon gave Probst the same response that certain content was deemed adult and thus filtered out of searches and lists. On April 12, 2009, all hell broke loose when the Twitterverse picked up on the deranking of gay, lesbian, erotic and feminist books. But to be clear, this started as far back as 2008. It’s just now come to a head.

There are numerous other points in the article and it really is quite thought provoking. Head there before posting your next Tweet. ;-)