While it becomes, more and more, the dominant bookseller of our time, even as it simultaneously sinks deeper in the red every quarter, Amazon.com has long been seen by many in the book business as automating thuggishness (go ahead, try selling your POD book on something other than their required system, or an e-book in a Sony Reader, i.e., non-Kindle, format). Of course, Amazon sells lots of other things now, yet the attitude seems to persist, and so perhaps it’s the never-made-a-profit requirement of severe understaffing and the yahoo-for-technology cover of over-automation that recently led the company to something as criminally inspipid as listing a Barack Obama Holloween mask on its “terrorist costume” page. You can see the screen capture on this item from the Los Angeles Times’ Top of the Ticket blog.