Censorship is alive and well.

Amazon.com is at the center of public outcry with regard to its glitches that caused LGBT-themed books to have their ratings inexplicably disappear.

Amazon has told larger news entities this was merely a response to dealing with adult-related content.

OK, Amazon.

According to CNN partner Web site CNET News, however, “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds” was still available. Said book contains hundreds of spreads of naked women.

What? That’s not adult-related enough for you?

Craig Seymour, NIU associate professor of journalism, said during the incident the sales rating for his gay-themed book, “All I Could Bare,” was gone. The search function wouldn’t work either when he tried to seek out his book, a fact that inevitably caused the decline in sales for said memoir.

“They never apologized,” he said. “They pretty much coded my book out of existence.”

Since the fix of the ‘malfunction,’ Amazon has come forward and acknowledged that something occurred but not that they actually did anything wrong.

But seated, talking on a bench outside a Reavis Hall classroom, Seymour didn’t sound bitter; he sounded reasonable, a trait Amazon.com hasn’t conveyed to its customers yet.

Way to go, Amazon. Seems the only reason you acknowledged something actually occurred was because everyone else had already seen it.

“They should be more transparent about how they do business; how they make those decisions,” Seymour said.

In her blog, “Confessions of a Curator,” Lynne M. Thomas, director of the LGBT Resource Center, addressed the debacle.

“This makes me incredibly angry,” she wrote. “It is wrong, and unnecessary. It is censorship, plain and simple.”

To this date, Amazon still hasn’t apologized for any part of the fiasco. It continues to rest on its laurels, claiming it just wanted to make its site safe for family searches, blah blah blah.

Enough, Amazon. Enough. I just successfully searched for porn on your Web site.

Congratulations to me.

Clean up after yourselves, and publicly recognize the horrific wrong you’ve done society, the LGBT community and your readers.

This isn’t just bad business; it’s a disgrace.