I sent the this letter to Amazon this morning. I recieved the reply that follows about an hour ago.
My letter:
Dear Amazon,
I am outraged at the current issue regarding de-ranking books. While Publisher's Weekly may have claimed that it was "a glitch," your own company had earlier released a statement claiming that these products, including same sex parenting books and Foucault's sexual theory books, are inappropriate for your normal searching public.
By these standards, I am assuming that you view your purchasing population to be closeminded, heteronormative, and not intelligent. If not, why would all these feminist, gender theory, and queer narratives (Ellen DeGeneres's biography is inappropriate!?) be removed?
Gay rights are human rights. If you refuse to represent these books, you are standing in the way of equality. Instead you promote books that will "heal" homosexuality.
I am a heterosexual, feminist, intellectual advocate for human rights, and I will not support a company that disenfranchises any author. I believe in the power of voting with my dollar. Therefore, you have lost a customer.
Sincerely
Gexx (actually, I used my real name)
Their response:
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.
Best regards,
Praveen Ponnam
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
http://www.amazon.com/your-account
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Their frank self-criticism is refreshing. I've used Amazon for years, so I'm glad I won't have to boycott them.
I submitted this last night before this was as widely publicized, and by this morning (before this was put up here) I noticed that multiple people had recieved/posted this letter from Amazon.
So if you think that this is a bit of a moot post, I agree. ;)
Looking at the response from Amazon.com, at least they have made an attempt to properly address the issue and made the effort to communicate to resolve the problem.
They are a big company and often overlooked many things so be lenient to them.
That was a very fast response from a big company like amazon and it was taken care the only way to satisfy a customer. Maybe next time you should mention that you are a writer of a very popular web magazine and maybe they will give you benefits cause of that.