A Kindle book I was attempting to purchase is listed as "Item Under Review," and "This title is not currently available for purchase." Amazon support was not able to tell me when it would be back or for how long it had been unavailable.
When I looked up the page on the Wayback Machine, it appears that the same message was displayed on July 27, 2017. It seems hard to believe that the problem has remained unaddressed for at least three years. Is it possible that this change to the page is recent, and the Wayback Machine is anachronistically integrating it into its archived versions of the page, or is the archived page conclusive evidence that the book has been unavailable since that date?
Best Answer
I suppose I could conceive of some odd dynamically generated page situations where it could happen, but...
Whether archive.org can behave that way or not isn't particularly relevant here because in this case it is definitely not.
I checked the source for that archived page (the actual source sent from Amazon's servers and thus stored statically on archive.org) and the "item under review" message is there. In other words, it wasn't generated dynamically by some sort of script. And so it was definitely present in the downloaded copy of the page that archive.org stored at that time.
Also according to this Twitter post somebody else observed the issue at least as far back as Nov 2018.
The most probable explanation is it was placed under review long ago for quality issues, and those issues were simply never resolved. That is not inconsistent with the message itself, either, which states "The publisher has been notified and we will make the book available as soon as we receive a corrected file". In this case, it appears the publisher never sent a corrected file. You'd have to ask the publisher why.