Over the course of a weekend, tens of thousands of people spread the word about the appearance of discrimination over books' sales ranks at Amazon.com--and it turns out that the problem can be traced back to one person's human error. Just two days ago, Amazon.com was calling the removal of sales rank on a variety of books the result ugg mall of explicit content. Over the Easter weekend, the search tag #amazonfail became more popular than #jesus when authors, bloggers, readers, and activists noticed that the sales rank removals seemed to target specific categories of books, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues, sexuality and health, erotica, biographies of gays and lesbians, feminist resources, books on disability, and even parenting guides. Without an Amazon.com sales rank, authors have limited data on how well their book is selling through the retailer, but more importantly, the unranked books may not appear in subject matter searches. Some authors of affected material discovered that their ranks had been removed several months discount Ugg ago, and writer/photographer Craig Seymour received the same answer in February that young adult literature author Mark R. Probst did this weekend: adult content. (Seymour's book is a memoir of job experiences that included working as a stripper; he's now an Associate Professor of Journalism at Northern Illinois University. Probst's novel is a gay romance.) A blog post by Probst prompted readers to start gathering data on hundreds of books--from a biography of John Barrowman to The Story of O--that were missing sales ranks and an online petition garnered more than 20,000 signatures. Phone numbers of Amazon.com's board members and contact e-mail addresses for different departments were posted publicly on many Web sites by infuriated consumers. By late Sunday, GHD Rare a spokesperson at Amazon had attributed the error to a "glitch" but could not provide additional information. In the meantime, confusion reigned as a hacker stepped forward to claim responsibility for creating a program that reported books for content he did not like, and stated that he was working in collusion with other webmasters to create false reports that were generated by Internet users visiting sites other than Amazon.com. (Testers report that the ugg outlet code the hacker posted as evidence did not work as claimed.) Conspiracy theories ranging from targeting by right-wing groups to an internal policy by Amazon to remove the titles from being searched spread like wildfire. Amazon insiders have reported that the problem stems from an error in the search algorithm uggs for cheap that happened when an employee in France mixed up the terms related to sexuality, erotica, and adult content. The error propagated to book listings on Amazon.com as well as its international sites.