This is going to erupt into a total hot tickety tack tranny mess for these poor souls.  They’re explaining it away as a glitch.  I’m a skeptical guy, and something as stupitarded as censoring all gay material from their site makes me immediately incredulous considering the part where they are the country’s biggest bookseller.  It’s really late now, but I’m totally excited for their inevitable press release tomorrow.  Here’s their official statement right now about the Glavlitty situation:

“There was a glitch with our sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed.  We’re working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.”

Okay, so I don’t know what a computer is.  I can’t even get my Wordpress theme to right-justify my header’s background image. BUT. I’m pretty sure it’s not just a “simple glitch” when a book detailing bestiality is unaffected while a book about colleges where gays can get funding for weekly snacktime is affected.  What kind of craptastical algorithm could they be possibly be using?  Any computer nerds want to hazard a guess?

Amazon deserves the benefit of the doubt right now until a more informative press release comes out when it isn’t the biggest holiday in Christendom.  The Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization that among other things ranks businesses on the LGBT-friendliness of their policies, ranks Amazon in their top tier of businesses.  They get an 80 out of 100.  Like a B-, mostly because they could do better in their policies towards transgendered policies.  Way better than, say, Ted Haggard’s church. But definitely in the bottom of the top tier.

Although Barnes & Noble did get a perfect score.  Just sayin’.

Here’s a Devil’s Advocate position on the situation. Although that author seems like a dick, and he’s not very good at convincing me that there wasn’t an “if gay then porn” situation. 

Here’s a pretty good explanation of why this is literally a big deal:

Why is this is a big deal?

It’s not because customers put any stock into the Amazon Ranking number. It’s that the Amazon Rank affects a books’ visibility on the bestseller list, on the “If you Like ___, you might like __ feature” and so forth. It is akin to the bookstore removing the books from the shelves and requiring you to go to the Customer Service desk and ask for the book or author specifically. Visibility is a huge factor in sales and anyone who doesn’t believe that is kidding themselves.

What would be a satisfactory result?  I don’t know.  Probably a statement saying “some deeb was a total deeb and tinkered with the ‘algorithm’ cuz he was ticked off by all of his recent losing, so we fired him.”  Calm my rage, Amazon.