In a post entitled, "Amazon.Com Banishes Queer SF Writers To A Null Dimension,"  sci-fi blog poster Charlie Jane Anders reports that Amazon.com has lowered the profile of books with deal with same-sex themes in a positive or non-judgmental way—presumably to appease a buying public understood or feared to be significantly intolerant (though a recent Gawker post claims that the sales ranks were actually removed from outside by a hacker—who took advantage of the company's "flag as inappropriate" function). The book have effectively been hidden under the counter by having their sales ranks removed, thereby preventing them from appearing on many searches. Users of Twitter in particular are mentioned as having originated the term (or tag) "AmazonFail" to refer to the move to hide the books in question. The move is not only troubling (insofar as it supresses books which could lead to more understanding) but has been inconsistently applied, noted Anders:

Authors like Nicola Griffith and Katherine V. Forrest saw all their science fiction books disappearing from Amazon search results. Also removed were science books like Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality And Biological Diversity. Curiously, David Gerrold's orgiastic The Man Who Folded Himself was unaffected, but his chaste book The Martian Child was erased. Similarly, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren seemed unaffected, but most editions of The Einstein Intersection were.

A recent Wall Street Journal blog about the controversy also noted that, if the idea is to "clean up" Amazon.com, the clean-up has left a hardcover edition of Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds unaffected. According to a recent AP article, "'There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed,' Amazon's director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, said in an e-mail Sunday." Anders writes: "When the L.A. Times asked why this 'glitch' only affected books with certain types of content, an Amazon.com rep declined to comment." If a hacker—and not Amazon.com—were in fact the responsible party, Amazon.com's lack of openness has not helped dispel the impression that it was at fault. 

UPDATE: According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogger Andrea James, in her post, "Amazon calls mistake 'embarrassing and ham-fisted'", Amazon.com has finally come forward and admitted that the books which fell off the virtual shelf were its fault; they have added however, that it wasn't merely same-sex books that got caught, but rather an entire swath of books that were erroneously categorized at Amazon.fr, which—given that all the Amazon sites are interdependent—ruined the status of books all across Amazon.com, a mistake which "impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica," according to Amazon.com. A former Amazon.com employee, Mike Daisey, says that insiders have told him that

"A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon." 

Kate Harding of Salon sums the debacle up this way:

Too bad that's about all they could say at this point, so both the folks who are convinced it was a hack and the folks who are convinced Amazon hates gay people will probably remain just as convinced as they were an hour ago.

UPDATE II:

Clay Shirky has written a post on the whole affair (The failure of #amazonfail, 15 April 2009) as a Twitter-er who repented.