Mike Daisey, the monologist and former employee at Amazon.com, told the Seattle PI that the weekend’s gay and feminist book fiasco was actually caused by an employee at Amazon.fr who confused the term “adult”—which refers to porn stuff in Amazon’s system—with “erotic” and “sexuality.” That sharp-toothed troll who claimed all the credit is going to be pretty miffed to find out about this.

Amazon also seems to be sending out the following plain-spoken email to customers who write in asking for a response. One of our readers sent this in, but we also found it on the Seattle PI site:

Hello,

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.

“Amazon calls mistake ’embarrassing and ham-fisted'” [Seattle PI] (Thanks to Jonathan!)
(Photo: ftzdomino)