Over this past weekend, Amazon.com removed the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books. Bloggers and Twitter users were furious so they coined a term, “AmazonFail.” Mark R. Probst first blogged about the incident after he received a message from an Amazon representative when he noticed that his rankings had disappeared from “Transgressions” and “False Colors” which are two new gay romance novels.
In the message from Amazon, they said that they exclude adult material from searches and best selling lists. However the “adult” classification was not being applied to an edition of “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds” according to Probst.
This past Sunday, about 20 Amazon employees were told that several novels were being improperly flagged as adult. AmazonFail was being more used than the words “Easter” and “Jesus” on Twitter.
“People got pulled away from their Easter thing when this whole thing broke,” stated an Amazon employee. “It was just a screwup.”
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