Amazon restores rankings for gay-themed books

ByABC News
April 15, 2009, 1:13 PM

NEW YORK -- Two days after Amazon said a "glitch" had caused the sales rank to be dropped from thousands of books, the numbers returned Tuesday for Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and other notable titles.

The online retailer issued a promise on Sunday that the numbers would be restored. But it was Tuesday morning before sales numbers were back in place for such recent works as Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life and from such classics as Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

"What kind of a childish game is this?" Vidal said Monday. "Why don't they just burn the books? They'd be better off and it's very visual on television."

On Monday, Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener called the deletions an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection." He said that 57,310 books in categories ranging from gay and lesbian literature to health and erotica had been affected.

"This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search," Herdener said. "Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."

Authors strongly questioned Amazon's explanation, with some posting e-mails they had received from the online seller that said their books had been placed in an unranked "adult" category, excluded from some searches and best-seller lists. And the glitch dates back to at least February, when Craig Seymour noticed that the ranking for his memoir All I Could Bare had been deleted. (It came back, he said, a few weeks later.)

Affected books include the scholarly (Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 ), the obscure (V.K. Powell's Suspect Passions ) and the famous. The sales rank has been missing for E. Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, the basis for the acclaimed movie which starred Heath Ledger, and for Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, winner of a National Book Award in 1992.