Hey, welcome to the party. A bit late. If you’d read the follow-up post, you’d see that I’d addressed the technical issues surrounding this, based on Amazon’s rather belated response. Interestingly — if you’d followed this story at all — you’d realize that the statements made by Amazon customer service, as contradictory as they were, were in some ways accurate.

The problem, of course, is that the problem didn’t just impact one kind of book. It impacted fiction, non-fiction, classics. One employee in France (according to the official story) made a huge error. It took weeks to unwind this error. The result, of course, was the authors lost sales *and* sales ranking, even after the glitch was undone. Sadly, the Amazon algorithm worked exactly as it should, and, for example, in the homosexual category, anti-homosexual books (based on false, dangerous premises) ranked in the top ten for far too long.

So dude, as you can see if you’d read anything beyond this, you’d understand that I don’t have a problem with Amazon’s methods to keep adult content behind a wall of sorts. The problem was huge, it had real world impact on sales (and careers), and Amazon never satisfactorily explained what happened (though we were able to infer from their unofficial statements). The fact that one employee in France could wreak so much havoc should be a major concern for any publicly traded company.