Twitter users on LGBT snub: #amazonfail
The sudden popularity of Twitter has been difficult for media types to process—is it the “ultimate in solipsism,” as Michael Kinsley complained, or a powerful generator of information and fun (as I would argue)?— but one thing became clear yesterday: It can turn a spark into a brushfire. That spark came from the author Mark R. Probst, who noted on his blog about the Amazon sales rankings for two new gay romance books—Erastes’ Transgressions and Alex Beecroft’s False Colors—had mysteriously disappeared from the site. From there, he discovered that hundreds of other gay and lesbian titles had also lost their rankings; when he queried Amazon’s customer service, he got this alarming response: