Regardless of what actually caused this, Amazon’s front line personnel reacted badly when questioned about it and little has been done to remedy or acknowledge this.

At least one author said he had encountered malfunctions in his sales rankings on Amazon as far back as February. Craig Seymour, an associate professor of communications at Northern Illinois University and the author of “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.,” a memoir, said his book had disappeared from most searches for several weeks but was restored in late February.

In a blog post late Monday, Mr. Seymour wrote that Amazon’s statement was a start, but not sufficient. “It does not explain why writers, like myself, were told by Amazon reps that our books were being classified as ‘adult products.’ ”

Amazon said in the statement that it planned “to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.” It did not elaborate on its statement.

As for things that continue to be valid points to critique Amazon about:
-Undercuts local book and comic book shops, as Mike Daisey in that link points out: “It’s just an online Wal-Mart.”

-One of the few high-profile businesses of its kind which has no charitable giving/employee-donation match for non-profits (especially noticeable in progressive-ish Seattle). Definitely fair that as a business, its wholly within its rights to give or not give to whomever it chooses but given that its profits are based almost entirely on the creative productivity of others– it would be prudent and also socially responsible of them to contribute to ongoing creative development within the arts. (The latter point was cribbed from someone else in a long debate on this subject, so I can’t lay claim to its soundness.)

It’s worth noting that a lot of the anti-gay books (most of which didn’t get de-ranked) don’t use category metadata like “gay”, instead going the general education/parenting/self-help route. LGBT people aren’t their primary audience, and people looking to fix their kids don’t look in the gay section of the bookstore.

P.S. Randall, girls doing it is okay. It’s dudes going at it that people have a problem with.

http://i.gizmodo.com/5210424/hacker-claims-he-shoved-amazon-into-the-closet-using-inappropriate-flag-exploit

In seriousness, thank you for this. It’s a great summation and kudos to you for your promised course of action. I won’t be using Amazon again in the future myself if this insulting BS continues.