London, April 14: Amazon. com has apologised for an error due to which the sales ranking were removed from tens of thousands of books, and it became difficult to search for tomes.

Making a statement on Sunday, the online retailer said that a "glitch" had caused the problem, and promised that the numbers would be restored.

However, sales numbers were still missing until Monday afternoon.

Hit by the error were recent works like Chelsea Handler''s My Horizontal Life, as well as classics like Gore Vidal''s The City And The Pillar and James Baldwin''s Giovanni''s Room.

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

Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener called the deletions an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection."

According to him, 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," he 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," he added. (ANI)