How Amazonfail was born!!!!!

While millions of people tuned in to Doctor Who and Red Dwarf over the Easter weekend my holiday entertainment was provided by typing 'amazonfail' into the Twitter search engine and watching the stream of outraged posts about the company that used to be the world's favourite bookstore flow across my laptop screen.The PR nightmare started at some point on Sunday when an angry post on the LiveJournal blog site by author and publisher Mark Probst broke through into online consciousness. He had noticed that his book The Filly, though still listed on Amazon's US website, had lost its sales ranking data and was no longer appearing in relevant searches.An e-mail from an Amazon representative informed Probst that his book, a romance featuring gay characters, had been classed as 'adult' and removed from the ratings system so that the search pages would be more 'family-friendly.'Two other high profile gay romance books, Transgressions by Erastes and False Colors by Alex Beecroft, had also lost their sales ranking. This meant it was only possible to find them by looking specifically for the title and author, so people searching for similar books, or similar titles were unlikely to find or buy them.It emerged that thousands of other books had been similarly delisted, including such radical texts as The Well of Loneliness and John Barrowman's autobiography, while a little research by interested bloggers found Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds, the Parent's Guide to Homosexuality and Hitler's Mein Kampf were all still searchable and proudly displayed.