I don't think calling their mistake accurately is exactly an apology. And if you note the areas that were miscoded -- glbt, erotica, sexual health and information, mind-body... it's all stuff that the religious right-wingers don't want people to see or know about.
I'd like to know who did it, why, and unless it's very clear that it was a case of stupidity and not malignant intent, I'd like to see the person fired. 57,000 books don't get labeled wrongly by accident.
Alternative possibility - Amazon is considering charging a fee to sales-rate items.
That may be far out, but... this is a company that tried to force all its print-on-demand books to buy print service from its own Booksurge printer. If someone would pull that sort of stunt, I am willing to believe they'd do almost anything. And Amazon only backed down from that over the threat of lawsuits.
No, but I did like the part about it being ham-fisted. That I thought of an admission of stupidity, which is next door to saying, "Amazon was wrong."
That said, I don't believe for one minute that one person did this. Fifty-eight thousand books? Yeah, right. That sounds like the work of an entire department to me. And if it's the work of a department, then it had to have been done with the permission of at least one supervisor. Given the sheer magnitude of the work, it had to have been done by a medium to large number of people, and they had to have--or to believe that they had--permission to do this.
Judging by the fumbling for explanations hours and days after the fact, I would say that Amazon never expected that large numbers of people would be upset. Which again argues that the coders who did this had approval, either express or tacit, and that this was quite deliberate on Amazon's part.
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I'd like to know who did it, why, and unless it's very clear that it was a case of stupidity and not malignant intent, I'd like to see the person fired. 57,000 books don't get labeled wrongly by accident.
Alternative possibility - Amazon is considering charging a fee to sales-rate items.
That may be far out, but... this is a company that tried to force all its print-on-demand books to buy print service from its own Booksurge printer. If someone would pull that sort of stunt, I am willing to believe they'd do almost anything. And Amazon only backed down from that over the threat of lawsuits.
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That said, I don't believe for one minute that one person did this. Fifty-eight thousand books? Yeah, right. That sounds like the work of an entire department to me. And if it's the work of a department, then it had to have been done with the permission of at least one supervisor. Given the sheer magnitude of the work, it had to have been done by a medium to large number of people, and they had to have--or to believe that they had--permission to do this.
Judging by the fumbling for explanations hours and days after the fact, I would say that Amazon never expected that large numbers of people would be upset. Which again argues that the coders who did this had approval, either express or tacit, and that this was quite deliberate on Amazon's part.
Oh, and I'm going to add this to the post above.
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