Amazon
As others have said, it only seems fair to Amazon that. having posted on the debacle last weekend, I should follow through.
So, i got this:
"Hello,
Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. 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.
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.
Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon."
Which I'm guessing was a standardized reply created to answer all of us who wrote to them.
When I get the chance, which at this rate will be Friday night GMT, I intend to follow this up, because to my mind it still doens't make complete sense. Because in order to affect 57,000+ titles, surely either
a) This person went into each article seperately - which seems unlikely OR
b) the articles were already linked in some way and someone just hit "adult = true" for one of them and it affected all the linked titles.
So I'd love to know either what linked all these titles that enabled them all to be flagged as "adult" at the push of a button OR what other method was used that allowed all the articles to have a flag changed.
Also, the whole censorship thing worries me anyway. WHY do they exclude certain items from searches? As various people have pointed out, technically you have to be over 18 to purchase from Amazon anyway. So exactly what customer base are they trying to keep in mind with this censorship? Because quite frankly, Playboy The Centrefolds (which is on Amazon and was NOT affected by this ham-fisted mistake/glitch) is not something I want to see in a shop when I'm browsing for the latest kid's book by Eric Carle, but I expect the shop and myself to avoid that problem by them labelling the shelves/department as "Adult Erotica" and "Children's Fiction" and by me then searching in the appropriate area. If I ASK the shop/site if they stock Playboy or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I should get told "yes, over there". I then DON'T expect to find Playboy sitting next to Roald Dahl's The BFG, but (through gritted teeth) nor do I expect persons wanting to buy Playboy to have to go to a specific desk to even ASK where to find the vile thing.
Having just learned about the massive sub-genre that is the gay romance novel, I'm also perturbed to learn that some shops, whilst apparently happy to stock Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins (both of whom can be VERY explicit on hetero sex and quite frankly I'd not want my children to think of sex in such a cheap manner) in the General Fiction and Romance sections, will stock gay romance novels only in the Erotica section. Alex Beecroft writes in this genre. Today I read her 'Insubordination' and far as graphic description is concerned, I've read some Jack/Ianto stuff which is more explicit (it did make me want to get her novels though. Cashflow prevents right now, but there we go).
So - whilst perhaps NOT the "hacker/Christian Right-pleasing/out-and-out homophobic thing we all feared this to be - something is still odd. Not to mention it's alarming to find that we are being censored and don't know it.
EDITED 16th April to add:
bloody hell! : http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/2009/04/16/
this seems to be a bit deeper than it appeared at the weekend.