Amazon apologises for ‘gay censorship’ error

Amazon has apologised for an "embarrassing and hamfisted cataloguing error" that caused more than 57,000 books to disappear from its bestseller charts, including several titles by homosexual authors.

Over the weekend Gore Vidal, Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson (pictured) all appeared to fall foul of what looked like a bizarre ruling that gay and lesbian titles should have their sales ranks removed in an apparent attempt to make Amazon’s bestseller lists look more "family friendly".

In a statement, Patty Smith, director of corporate communications for Amazon, said today that it had been "misreported" that the problem was limited to gay and lesbian themed titles. "In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine, and erotica," she said.

"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." The online bookseller was in the process of fixing the problem, she added.

The sales rank is a hugely important figure for authors because it helps measure how well a title is selling by comparison with other books and ensures that a book appears in 'bestseller' lists on the site.

Smith's apology follows a series of contradictory statements from the Seattle-based retailer. Over the weekend, Amazon declared that the rankings of titles containing "adult material" had been taken off "in consideration of our entire customer base".

Titles included Vidal's The City and the Pillar, a coming-of-age tale in which a boy discovers his homosexuality, Winterson's Oranges are not the Only Fruit, about a lesbian girl in a religious community, and Forster's novel Maurice, a homosexual love story written during World War One and published only after the author's death in 1970.

On Monday the online retailer blamed a "glitch" in the system which it was working to rectify and today Patty Smith issued her apology.