NEW YORK – Amazon.com apologized Monday for an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" that led to the sales ranking being removed from tens of thousands of books.

The online retailer initially said Sunday that a "glitch" had caused the problem and promised that the numbers would be restored. But Monday afternoon, sales numbers were still gone for such recent works as Chelsea Handler's "My Horizontal Life" and from such classics as Gore Vidal's "The City and the Pillar" and James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room."

"What kind of a childish game is this?" Vidal said Monday. "Why don't they just burn the books? They'd be better off and it's very visual on television."

On Monday, Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener called the deletions an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection." He said that 57,310 books in categories ranging from gay and lesbian literature to health and erotica had been affected.

"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," Herdener said. "Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."

Authors strongly questioned Amazon's explanation, with some posting e-mails they had received from the online seller that said their books had been placed in an unranked "adult" category, excluded from some searches and best-seller lists. And the glitch dates back to at least February, when Craig Seymour noticed that the ranking for his memoir "All I Could Bare" had been deleted. (It came back, he said, a few weeks later.)

Affected books include the scholarly (Michel Foucault's "The History of Sexuality, Volume 1"), the obscure (V.K. Powell's "Suspect Passions") and the famous. The sales rank has been missing for E. Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," the basis for the acclaimed movie which starred Heath Ledger, and for Paul Monette's "Becoming a Man," winner of a National Book Award in 1992.

The "glitch" has even turned on former Amazon favorites, among them M.J. Rose's "Lip Service," promoted back in 1999 as a a self-published novel which found an audience on Amazon.

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Thanks for posting this. I finally found Amazon's toll-free customer service number on their website and called them to complain about this. I was assured that they were aware of the problem and that the problem should be fixed shortly. I did ask if there had been a lot of complaint calls and the customer service rep assured me that there had been.

I think some people thought it was all part of some grand conspiracy by Amazon. I can`t see what Amazon had to gain by it, so I prefer to think of it as `human error` (or should that be computer error), which we are all prone to at times.

Computer errors happen all the time, even to the best websites. I understand that Amazon is a multimillion dollar company which should be able to avoid these types of "glitches", however I think that anyone who's attacking Amazon like this mr. Vidal should realize that running a website that large is no easy task and things happen.

There are always conspiracy addicts, some people just love to "find" obscure reasons for every single event. I'm also with the human error explanation