I believe them, that this is a categorization error, especially your man from France -- I once outsourced a medical classification system, and when I got it back the New Delhi-based team had classified homosexuality as "a mental illness of the genital area". This is one node, mind you, buried in about seventy pages of medical jargon, intended for Western content. I caught it before we launched it, but I can only imagine what would've happened if that team had been working on tagging rather than creating the classification structure. And when I'd gone looking for the tags, at first glance it would've just read "Homosexuality".

Considering all this blew up on Easter weekend, when everyone would've been away from any logs, I'm not surprised PR didn't have an immediate answer for the masses. Discovering the glitch is one thing; crawling through the enormous Amazon taxonomy to find what's throwing it? That's a nightmare.

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The real question is, where's that Bezos on a Bearskin rug shot when we need it, Sweaterbear?

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False dichotomy. There are myriad other explanations, including the possibility that each book was tagged and/or reported by individuals in an organized or unorganized effort by people with particular religious sensibilities, so that content which offended was no longer displayed. I'm not suggested that's definitely what happened, but this hacker's story has already been debunked and doesn't reflect the actual evidence, which seems to be that authors have been complaining about this sort of things for months and the issue's just reached critical mass.

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