Amazon is notorious for secrecy. Whatever the cause was, you're not going to find out unless you have a loose-lipped friend at the company. This lack of information is leading to some serious alarmism.

I find it amusing but also a little disturbing to see so many people ready to jump to the worst conclusions, with ZERO actual knowledge of the situation. This isn't faux-outrage. It's misplaced outrage. It's unfortunate that these items were de-ranked for a couple of days, but the fact that their absence sparked so much interest only highlights what a service Amazon was providing in the first place. How many cities in America have gay bookstores? How many bookstores period have the LGBT selection that Amazon does? How much profit and exposure has Amazon generated for LGBT authors?

I'm a big fan of Amazon, so it is nice to see some people giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure a lot of people would like to know what happened, but the bottom line is that Amazon is fixing the problem.

If someone is selling pirated DVDs or child pornography or guns or whatever, the fastest way for Amazon to find out is to rely on customers warning them, and the only way to deal with it that is delist the stuff that's flagged until someone has a chance to review it.

Why? Because if one pirated DVD makes it past the Amazon gateway, the world will implode? It would make far more sense, wouldn't it, to wait until after the review to delist the item?

Isn't Amazon stock at ~79. worth a little effort to see how gay dollars impact the economy, specifically Amazon's?

There are so many books in publication that no one store can carry everything. In fact most stores now a days, unless they are one of the big chains, tend to specialize in order to survive.

It is also nice not to have to go locally where someone might connect me to my work professionally (my name really isn't Ghingis Poo). I really do not want people judging me on what I read. It is none of their business. I am straight, white, middle age, and look conservative (albeit my politics are all over the map). I went in to my local Barnes and Noble in the bay area to buy some book a while ago. The lady behind the counter (who looked like an aging granola eating burnt out hippie chick) asked me if I wanted to join their book club to save 10% or whatever it is. My retort was, "They already turned me down. They said I looked too Republican." The hippie started to laugh outloud whereby she then caught herself and stopped. For about two seconds there was this very uncomfortable look on her face because she realize I actually might be Republican.

I just paid in cash and said, "thank you".

Amazon, particularly Amazon Marketplace, lists literally millions of items. They can't possibly read / test all of these things. They have to rely, in large part, on customer feedback.

True enough. Keep in mind that we're not talking about "Amazon Marketplace" items here, though.

My point is that a system that allows customers to flag items as inappropriate and automatically removes those items without a review is a bad idea. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to allow customers to flag an item, but "remove first, review later" is a pretty crappy policy, IMHO. How long would it take Amazon to review an item if the abuse wasn't widespread and the resultant furor wasn't prompting them to quick action?

Relying on customer feedback makes good sense, but not in a way that allows customers to game the system or use it to hurt people whose work offends them in some way. And what criteria is used by Amazon to review whether a book, for example, has been legitimately flagged? I guarantee you that my books would legitimately offend certain people, absolutely. Does that mean I should be excluded from rankings? Ann Coulter's books offend me. Can I exclude her from rankings? I guarantee I can find 10, 100, 1000 people who will report her along with me. Does that mean we have the right to do so?

That's why I say this is a slippery slope. Whose offense takes precedence? Who gets to decide what is adult or objectionable in some way? How much sex in a novel is "too much"? Does it depend upon the level of detail or the words used? Who is going to read every book to determine how explicit a sex scene is, and against what criteria will they be judged?

So yes, I think it's a terrible idea to put these decisions into the hands of a customer base that represents the entire spectrum of sensibilities and triggers. My point was never that Amazon shouldn't allow items to be reported, but that they would need to be very, very careful about what they actually removed (and it should never be done automatically).

Sure, remove stuff that's illegal (like child porn, if anyone was actually idiotic enough to attempt to list it on Amazon, which I find extremely unlikely given the legal consequences). Beyond that, you're making value judgments, which really isn't a game a "customer-centric" company wants to get into.

I don't expect them to say how they're going to fix it if they don't know what happened, but any PR hack could tell them that they need to issue some kind of better reassuring public statement than "it's a glitch" if they are concerned about losing sales and alienating customers - perception is everything when it comes to business, especially retail business, and I would expect competent execs to know that and act accordingly.

Until they know how to fix it. One of 2 approaches to having your site or software hacked. Maybe not the best choice, but this has never happened to them before so cut them some slack for their inexperience here.

Book titles have nothing to do with what was done here. The meta data ("tags") is what was used. Every book was tagged adult, gay, lesbian, homosexual, erotica, words of that nature. That's why The Golden Compass was excluded.

There seems to be a lot of willingness to believe Amazon "did this to" the gay and lesbian population. Maybe that's what comes of spending a lot of time thinking people are out to get you (rightly so an unfortunate percentage of the time). They didn't. They aren't stupid. They make their living largely on the fact that they sell titles like these, which you can't always find in your neighborhood bookstore, and they make them easy to find as well.