Amazon's Gay Book 'Glitch': What Really Happened?

15.04.2009
is degenerating into a case of "he said, she said" -- or, to be more accurate, "he said, they sort of implied." In one corner, you have a hacker insisting he caused hundreds of Amazon books to lose their sales ranks and disappear from best-seller lists. In the other, you have Amazon using to vaguely explain the error without directly denying the hacker's claims.

Amazon's PR guard may be on high right now, but that's not keeping insiders from sharing their takes on what actually went down. New insights from an unnamed Amazon employee, along with fresh statements from the self-proclaimed Amazon hacker, are filling in some blanks in the controversy dubbed by Twitterers as .

Here's the story: Over the weekend, that caused nearly 60,000 books to be stripped of their sales ranks. A sales rank shows how well a book is selling on the site and helps it secure spots in Amazon searches and best-seller lists.

Sunday, many titles with gay- and lesbian-themed topics being affected -- everything from Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain to James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. When he contacted Amazon, he says he was informed that the change took place because the books had "adult" content. By that night, had gained momentum, and Twitter had taken on the role of the unofficial meeting point for online surfers seeking answers.

Monday, a hacker who calls himself "Weev" said he caused the whole thing by exploiting an Amazon.com feature for reporting inappropriate content. Shortly after on his claim was published, an Amazon spokesperson e-mailed me a statement describing the issue as "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error." When I inquired further about the cause of that "cataloging error" and whether a hack could have led to it, he neglected to provide a direct answer. After initially chastising me via e-mail for even asking (first response received: "Did you read the statement?"), he went on to respond only by resending a piece of his original statement with two added words: "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error by Amazon."