Slashdot Mirror
Amazon: Authors Can't Review Books
In an effort to step up its fight against astroturfers, Amazon has barred authors from reviewing books. It's not simply that authors can't review their own books — they can't review any book in a similar genre to something they've published. "This means that thriller writers are prevented from commenting on works by other authors who write similar books. Critics suggest this system is flawed because many authors are impartial and are experts on novels." British author Joanne Harris had a simpler solution in mind: "To be honest I would just rather Amazon delete all their reviews as it... has caused so much trouble. It is a pity. Originally it was a good idea but it is has become such an issue now. The star rating has become how people view if a book is a success and it has become inherently corrupt." How would you improve the online review system?
Provide Data on the Poster rating based on the Star System and give an average and/or a list of all the Posters star reviews to provide a balance. This way you can see if a particular poster is always picking 1 star for anything or not.
There is absolutely no value in having random people review things. Criticism isn't a democratic principle.
Reviews are only valid from people that maintain that as their profession. There is a level of experience that comes with reviewing and editing that can't be achieved casually. Even many professional critics don't have this skills.
In each field, there are only a few peoples opinions that matter. The rest can be determined by demographic sampling.
There's a slight hope that they either did not include tech authors in the ban or just didn't get around to us techies just yet. When I checked just now my review of Michael W. Lucas' SSH Mastery was still available.
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
I think online reviews are only worth anything when you have dozens or, better yet, hundreds. A few reviews are usually worthless.
You have a system that reviews the reviewers, allowing for weighted values of reviews. Not that slashdot users would have heard of mod points or metamoderating.
One blindingly obvious way to cut down on fake and artificial reviews: only allow reviews from people who have actually purchased the product.
Amazon already highlights reviews by people who have purchased the product, so the functionality already exists. Why not take the next step and only allow those people to write reviews in the first place?
Alternately, Amazon could allow anyone to write a review, but would only calculate the star rating based on purchasers' reviews.
Slashdot commenters not being able to moderate other's comments in stories they commented in?
Oh wait....
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Obligatory xkcd
for all that good that has done us in fields such as "cold fusion" and zillions of miracle medical cures that all "need more study" because the group is small, and the signal is only found with electron microscopes on further review with stacks of cash being scurried about.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That worked so well.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
http://xkcd.com/937/
This has often reflected my experience an any online store (and for anything, not just books). People don't seem to employ much perspective when assigning an overall rank. I recently saw a one star rank given to an app where the review stated the app did exactly what it was supposed to do... but he wasn't happy a particular feature wasn't present.
#DeleteChrome
Perhaps they should mark the author and publisher accounts differently than the average population (similar to /. subscribers)? The viewer of the reviews could then see the bias (if there is one). Seems simple enough, as I do like having the Amazon review system in place.
I'm reminded somewhat of two pertinent XKCD comics:
TornadoGuard/937
Star Ratings/1098
Interesting how they're kind of at odds with each other, but both true.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Very simple way to improve Amazon, or any retail site, reviews is to only allow people to post reviews on things they have pursued from the site. Apart from the obvious elimination of bogus reviews it also prevents idiocy such as people posting reviews like 'will this work with my Xbox?'
Ratings of books should reflect what other readers *with similar taste to mine* feel is appropriate.
Like netflix movie reviews.
How hard is that? I mean - yeah, it's hard. But how hard is it to know that is the solution?
Like ban them from Amazon reviews forever. So the next time someone posts a 1 star review because the editor didn't catch a comma or the kindle version is not formatted perfectly for the very first kindle device ever made.. I think it would clean it up some.
Label the reviews which are written by authors in similar genres, and let the readers incorporate that information into their perception of the review.
No system is unhackable, but just make it more frustrating. Either provide a random quiz or make it so you have to turn every page on the Kindle. This approach definitely has cons and can be hacked, so maybe also have 4 different ratings at the top. One from all users; one from authors; one from certified Amazon reviewers; and one from users that have passed the Book Reading Turing test.
What we need is A.I. that can review it. We also need A.I. that can parse the text into an Artificial Neural Network so that "similar" books can be found. If you like book X, you'll more than likely like book Y. The whole point of the reviews is to see if you'll like the book, right? Then use a Genetic Algorithm based on the star reviews to learn if they actually do match or not and add/deduct bonus points appropriately. I'll get right on this. See you in 50 years!
The G
I would imagine authors being much less partial as reviewers of other authors than book editors and publishers. Where's the system that moderates their comments?
George Orwell was a literary critic by trade.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
As an (newbie-ish) author, I resisted the urge to review my own book, but I had spent a bunch of time reviewing other books thinking that it would be a nice way to find people of like mind and thereby interest them in my own writing. All my work deleted, so it seems.
I have to stop making the mistake of using websites owned by big businesses.
Stross's blog said it all a couple days ago. For those living under a rock, he's a pretty good modern sci-fi / horror type author. Disclaimer, probably biased toward him for having similar religious beliefs.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/12/understanding-reviewers.html
TLDR poorly done summary interpretation:
Dumb people don't like feeling dumb, so most 1 star reviews are illiterate trailer trash... and the writing quality clearly reflects it. Ignore.
Hard core fans will rate everything you do as 5 stars. Meaningless. Ignore. So he doesn't like my reviews. Whatever.
A U shaped curve indicates nothing about quality and everything about high impact, also the opposite n shaped curve indicates apathy and low impact.
So.... applied to the article, first, analyze the shape of the "star" curve. Next, toss out any reviews that appear to be written in crayon by illiterates. Toss out any review where everything the author has ever written gets 5 stars. Analyze the remaining reviews by content... "apathy words" in the 3-star column of the histogram are bad news, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Simple: Reputation of the reviewer.
First, don't let anyone review until they've had an Amazon account for at least six months and made at least three purchases (on different days) in that time.
Second, post the reviewer's name (their real name, not a handle). Don't like that? Don't review anything.
Third, don't allow people to review products they haven't bought through Amazon.
Fourth, if someone has more than ten percent of their reviews deleted as spam or abusive, block that account from any more reviews.
Fourth-and-a-half, if a product has a large percent of its reviews deleted, "lock" it to only allow reviews by much more reputable users.
I would relax those a little for simply giving a star rating rather than writing a review, but not by much. I would also use a weighted rating system, based on the user's average rating. Not only would this get around the "No-star Nancy"s, it would work to avoid the useless inverse-exponential ratings we see on 99% of products, thus moving the "real" average rating to a three - So a five-star product would really mean a five-star product.
I wonder if they're going to enforce this no-financial-interest-in-competing-product rule with regard to academic books. In disciplines where book writing is expected of scholars (most of the humanities, but much less so in the sciences), most of the best qualified reviewers will themselves be scholars who have a book on a related topic or be working towards having a book on a related topic.
But reviews online are certainly corrupt. I don't use the star ratings for anything, unless an item only has a few reviews and all bad, and rely almost entirely on the BAD reviews for everything I purchase. If the bad reviews follow a common theme, it's a believable problem, and if I care about that problem vs. the price of the item, then I look for another item. Honestly I put less faith in the good reviews than the bad ones, especially when they're all glurge - no book, no product is perfect.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
...everyone has one, and everyone thinks that everyone else's stinks.
How about just allowing reviews of people you know or trust to be seen? Not that everyone and the kitchen sink cant review something.. but lets say you have a few friends and maybe you see a few people online who review things that you agree with a lot.. why not limit the reviews you see or maybe just have an option to see only those.. maybe even allow for a few levels of those people's friends.. instead of this everyone and their corporate brother laundry list of crap reviews which has basically rendered reviews imho to crap.
Just a thought..
I pay little attention to the star ratings. I look at the highest reviews, the lowest of reviews, the middle reviews and make my judgment from the comments about the actual product and how it performed compared to people's expectations. It's easy to mess with the ratings, but I look at the *reasons*. Anyone who bases their decision solely on a single number -- good or bad -- isn't a particularly discriminating purchaser anyway.
Why would anyone care what a random stranger thinks of a book?
There are probably six people in the world whose opinion I respect when it comes to a book that I'd purchase. And there may be 100 people who could earn that respect from me. None of those would write a review on amazon.
I think that somewhere along the line, people got "transitioned" from expert reviews to public commentary as though they are the same thing. They aren't. I coludn't care less what you think of a book. It doesn't guide my purchasing behaviour, and it certainly isn't a prediction of my preference of the same book. Why would it be?
The problem is they want a cheap and/or free review system they don't have to pay for.
They might be able to have a volunteer group of book reviewers but someone will have to manage those reviewers and inevitably, it will cost Amazon even to maintain a crew of volunteers.
The short is they need to hire people to do the reviews. That's right. Employees! What a novel idea right? Okay, I know I didn't think of it first. But the reality is in everyone's face. Sourcing opinions from online sources results in a lot of what we see .... here, there, everywhere. If they want good reviews and opinions, they will have to pay for them. But who would volunteer for that? Not me... well maybe I would if the pay was good. But there are a lot of people who would do this as a part-time job to be sure.
Critics suggest this system is flawed because many authors are impartial and are experts on novels.
That's pretty daft criticism, the point isn't that *all* authors won't be impartial, just that some are likely not to be.
I want to see the review rating in a relative way. I want to see what people who reviewed similar items as me have reviewed what I'm looking at. And in the absent of data, I want amazon to make some approximations or just give up. I don't want amazon and sites like it to show people product ratings until they reviewed some things themselves either.
A the review of sci-fi space opera junkie is going to be significantly more influential in my buy decision for some trashy space opera than some negative reviews by some hard SF readers or fantasy reader that "just started reading scifi".
The whole reviewers must be professional angle has some merit. But I think it has more to do with our ability to judge the appropriateness of individual reviews and scale them relative to our own tastes. When it is a wild west of anonymous reviewers with no smarts in the review information, it makes it difficult to interpret the ratings.
Besides, people wrongly interpret those ratings as absolute quantities. So I would argue that the ratings on amazon aren't generally worthwhile, or at least pretend to have too high of precision. (scale of 1-5 stars should maybe just be 0-1 dislike/like)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
re: I have to stop making the mistake of using websites owned by big businesses. ;>) ]
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Yep. I agree wholeheartedly [and wholespleenedly, though my kidneys are of two minds, right kidney says "meh", left kidney agrees with you
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You, your writings, and your reviews are all just tools to be used by Amazon to make more money. You attempted to use the system for good and Amazon said "no, we're changing the rules". Other examples, see Facebook for their almost weekly change in privacy settings, Google for this monthly droppage of sites still in beta that they've decided not to keep in beta and not to update anymore, Microsoft for their latest version of Zune/WindowsPhone/crappy-music-system/PlaysForEva/PlaysForSure(forsureitdoes), and apple as they keep changing their app-store policies.
Amazon should limit online book reviews to people for whom Amazon has a record of that specific book being purchased ...
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As such, I discussed writing a PIC book with my editor...we decided it just wasn't worth it with this prick around panning everything that "competed" with him, when it was actually better than his best work. I don't know how we fix that - the slashdot system, or at least making those jerks buy one - but we need to fix it.
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PICs could have become as popular as the Arduino - at a fraction of the total cost. But they never did, and you can lay it at the door of one dishonest prick.
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Maybe it doesn't matter. The book I DID write sold lots - but I never got a dime after the advance, the various publishers who have owned it have sometimes even claimed *negative* sales, which I have trouble believing, since I got all those emails from my email in the code (they sanitized the book thinking they could keep sales secret from me, but were too lazy to read the code and check for my email there...).
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
...as a result of someone taking out a personal vendetta against me, I can say that the system obviously has flaws.
The Amazon Verified Purchase system is a decent idea and perhaps something that should be taken farther. Maybe not lock the system down to just AVPs, but perhaps change the weighting system.
Critics suggest this system is flawed because many authors are impartial and are experts on novels
I had problems with other authors of similar books writing bad reviews of my book on Amazon. It was pretty obvious who was doing it because every time I'd get a good review, a bad one would pop up a couple days later from someone who obviously hadn't read the book.
I'm not vain enough to think everyone who reads my book should like it but the neg reviews were sometimes disagreements about topics not even covered in the book.
It was very frustrating and I complained to Amazon. They didn't respond directly but a short time later the behavior stopped.
I pay attention to what readers like and don't like and make refinements based on their feedback, so I appreciate thoughtful feedback even if it's not positive.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If it's about Drupal, automatically give it 8/10.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People put too much stock in reviewers, especially "professional" reviewers.
Millions of people think britney spears is a good singer, millions of people think transformers is a great movie, millions of people think mcdonalds has good food, millions of people think that tom cruise is a great actor, millions of people think dancing with the stars is great television, and so on. Now I dont agrree with any of them, why would I pay attention to even one persons review on a book or a movie? If the book interests me Ill try it, if it doesnt interest me then I wont.
It really is that easy folks, you dont need someone to tell you whats good or whats bad. The only way it works is if every single person all shared the exact same tastes and opinions on things.
If Amazon has enough spare computing power and resources I'd suggest that they allow and even encourage everyone[0] with an account to review and rate stuff.
;) ).
;).
Then what they do is crunch through all the numbers and figure out groups that have similar preferences (how coarse or fine is up to them). These are now your "ViewGroups" (viewpoints, but "points" can be confusing and you can't trademark viewpoints as easily
Then OPTIONALLY have someone clever name the top[0] X largest of these ViewGroups appropriately and make them either explicitly or indirectly (and other unnamed ones[1]) available to people to use as they wish when they are looking for stuff. This is optional, you can still have people use viewgroups without explicitly naming them.
So if you are looking for a present for your grand aunt, you just select the appropriate ViewGroup[1] and then search for stuff or her. You might be less likely to find "Call of Duty" but that's a feature.
And if you are looking for a gift for someone who likes "50 Shades", you do something similar. Or if you're being naughty you pick something "opposite"
Lastly, ideas are easy, implementation and "polish" is difficult. Nowadays patents suck and slow down progress. I'm getting old, and lots of cool stuff just isn't happening soon enough. Too often it's because of stupid crap like "one click".
[0] You might need to tweak a bit for cleverer spammers and their sock puppets. The dumber spammers and sock puppets will just end up in their own ViewGroups that hardly anyone but researchers would use.
[1] You could have people go through a wizard/form to pick a ViewGroup (whether named or unnamed). The wizard could ask them what items are liked or disliked. e.g. "Likes 50 Shades", "Likes Hello Kitty", "Dislikes Harry Potter".
What about 5 star reviews given for the wrong reasons?
'Bought it as a gift, my nephew says its great.' 5 stars
'Didn't do what was advertised but works for my purposes.' 5 stars
'I love what color it is.' 5 stars
In the good old days you'd go into a bookshoppe and ask a member of staff for a recomendation. If you were a regular reader or you knew a little about the subject, you'd simply browse a shelf and flip the pages of a book and you'd make up your own mind about its quality. Unfortunately, in these dark iDays you need to trust all the other iDiots out there because you have no access to dead tree books. So the solution is simple - do away with the evil on-line booksellers.
Simply set their reviews aside and mark them as such. So if the author of Cooking Carrots reviews Cooking Lots of Carrots you can get a better understanding. If they give an otherwise 5 star book a crap review you think "sour grapes" but if they give it a 5 star review then you think, "Hmmmm an expert and competitor giving 5 stars is pretty damn good."
I read one Amazon thing where the author does a video about their books. The author trashes one of their own books. Basically the author said the publishing company ruined it. That is the most awesome review I have seen on Amazon.
If they are going to ban anybody it should be two groups, first the angry group that just keeps handing out 1 star reviews. The second group should be publishers. You can tell their 5 star review from a mile away all perfect market speak that nearly matches the books official description, "A gripping tale spanning 4 continents and two world wars..."
It seems to be the rage these days to knock any online review site. Restauranteurs hate yelp, authors hate amazon, etc. Guess what - nothing's perfect, but they're pretty good. Are the Amazon ratings perfect? No, especially for situations with few reviews. But who the hell doesn't already know that and take it into account?
I like amazon's ratings system a lot. You can tell a lot from the distribution of scores. You have the actual reviews you can actually read. They flag the most useful favorable/unfavorable review, and in my experience, they really are useful. They also aggregate commonly mentioned topics, so you can identify common themes with respect to a product - like a common defect.
Same thing with yelp. Sure, the scores can be skewed by hipsters, yuppies, or assholes who make it their life's mission to review things and be clever. But more often than not, I've found the reviews to be fair. And I've also found that reading a handful of positive reviews and negative reviews gives you a very good impression of a place - same with amazon.
So no, these review systems aren't perfect. But they're really good, and as a result I'm much more likely to actually like the stuff I buy than back in the bad old days when you waited until someone you know bought something you want, or bite the bullet yourself. It's much better now, and just because there's room for improvement doesn't mean we should throw it all away.
This is good. I don't want to read reviews by experts e.g., authors. I want to read reviews by other readers. I find the reviews on Amazon very helpful. They must be taken with a teaspoon of salt - actually read the reviews rather than just looking at the star ratings. Often there are garbage reviews both 5 star and 1 star. Sift out the chaff and there is good actual user reviews.
i've seen this in app store reviews a lot. the xkcd jokes are so spot on its ridiculous. People use 1 star to complain about everything. and i mean everything. not only that they see the star system as a kind of tech support line. "didn't work. fix then i'll re-rate" well wth didn't work. i have no clue. you didn't contact support so we could help you. i don't know if its our ADHD society or just the way things are moving. Good reviews are usually 4-5 stars made by people that either had little problems, no problems or communicated with the company the resolve a problem. "downloaded, no issues, great product", "downloaded, but hiccup on install, still a great product." "wouldnt install. contacted support they fixed it up"
if you are a "free" app in the apple app store people use it to complain about your "price" so i don't put things for free on the apple app store anymore. i want someone who purchased my app to review it. and i mean purchased it. not just downloaded it.
The google one is even worse. i can purchase the product, immediately return it for a full refund AND leave a review. wth. so if you really really really hate an app have you and your 10-20 friends buy and refund the app and then leave a 1 star review.
i really wish the star rate would change slightly. 3.75 stars with 80% being above 3 stars tells me a lot more then 3.75 stars
I use Amazon, Newegg and a few other sites in the exact same way. I look at the 5star reviews and find out what's in common, I look at the 1 star reviews and figure out what's in common and then I read a few more reviews of the 3 and 4 star variety. You can then very quickly and easily throw out the fanboy reviews and the reviews that were 1 star because the item showed up DoA or otherwise (and even these can be helpful if there are tons of them and it's a reoccurring issue).
It's fairly instinctive to read reviews like this and most of the people I know read them in a similar way. So I really don't know why this is a big deal.
I posted a review of my own book on Amazon.
For reference, I quote it here in case this causes it to get removed there:
It's also considered the most helpful review at the moment. (FWIW, I still use the book as a reference, and apparently so do some of my coworkers.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I don't know how much of a change this would be for amazon, but for other websites, I wish they would force a user to give reviews of varying degrees. Someone giving everything a 5 star review, has a pretty worthless opinion. Same, for all 1 star reviews. Have some rule that says "You have to give roughly the same number of 5 star reviews as the other star reviews". If you really want to give an item a 5 star review, and you've used up your 5 star quota, either re-review some items, or find more items to give 3 star reviews to, so you can 'earn' another 5 star review.
I usually look for a bell curve in the graph of starred reviews. If I see two curves, I usually go to read the lesser-starred reviews. This can go both ways with competitors leaving poor reviews, but you can usually tell. The other is looking at the user's other reviews. If they leave a very favorable review and it is their only review on Amazon, then chances are it's a bunch of crap. Would be nice if you could filter reviews more based on how many reviews a person has left.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
> The star rating has become how people view if a book is a success and it has become inherently corrupt.
The star rating system is riddled with rubbish like "The book arrived on time and was in good condition. Would definitely recommend this seller. 10/10" and often worse "This book was late and the damaged. 0/10".
That is, the Amazon rating system is a rating of the SELLER, and seldom the book! The uselessness of this has been pointed out to Amazon but instead of telling customers to review the book and not the seller (the easy way), they've added a stupid "Is this review useful?" button which doesn't fix the erroneous star ratings. Amazon have an awesome resource, a user-based rating of nearly every book on the planet, and they squandered it out of sheer laziness by their IT staff and management. Crazy they are cracking down on author reviews without fixing this.
okay, 50 Shades sounds like crap, but I often see fanboys/fangirls overrate decent stuff - modern mainstream franchises are most likely to have such problems, and it can annoy the saner fans.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
there's plenty of people who are apparently incapable of reading the product description before purchase and then give horrible reviews because their new pizza slicer makes a lousy HDTV antenna. Or down-rate a product because the particular supplier they purchased from took six weeks to deliver it, or the UPS guy decided to play street hockey with the box, etc.
Yes, many people leave reviews unrelated the product. That's a negative that Amazon should do something about (delete those after users flag them?) but there still seems to be plenty of upside in having more reviews.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
a lot of critics seem to be at their best when making fun of bad stuff. assuming the thing really is bad, then that's both entertaining and fair.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
it seems unfair and counterproductive to shut out people who acquired the product elsewhere - logically, their opinions would be just as valid as people who purchased the product on Amazon.
However, I don't see how you could reliably allow those while still reliably shutting out people who haven't used the product at all.
Also, purchased-on-Amazon can lead to seller/shipment complains irrelevant to the product itself, a different problem.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
You can automatically judge reviewers of large numbers of book by determining how well their reviews fall into a normal distribution.
That is - from a individual's subjective opinion, after reading 1000 books - should form a roughly normal distribution (the worst, the best etc).
So you weight a person's contribution to the overall score by their fit to the normal distribution on their own reviews and the number of reviews they have made.
A rough approximation for the purposes of a 5 star score is 1: 5%, 2: 15%, 3:60%, 4: 15%, 5: 5%. Of course these numbers could be adjusted to allow for equal numbers in each group if they wanted.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
If it's about RuPaul, automatically give it 0/10.
I don't care how good some schmuck thinks something is. I only care if they think it is worthwhile or not...and their reasons for thinking that. Books can then have a tomatometer-ish rating based on the percentage of positive reviews. For the real story, you always have to read reviews. Arbitrary star ratings and percentages assigned by random reviewers are useless and give added weight to overly enthusiastic half-wits who are barely not typing in all-caps.
it's FAR worse than you think...
and you'll notice how people tend to "review" favorably when what they're reviewing was a gratis "payment" or "gift" to them...
( I found this out when I was offered a fairly expensive program,
in exchange for reviewing it...
not for reviewing it favorably,
just for reviewing it,
but realized that my view was so contaminated by social-torque
that I simply didn't accept or use the program,
let-alone review it... )
then I discovered that many "professional" reviewers get ALL their stuff free, ...and then I understood better, how
essentially having tax-free income in product-form...
absence-of-astroturfing interferes with profit/exploitation,
& corporate psychopaths/single-function-"persons" have
the legal obligation to exploit
as completely & vigorously as possible...
you see a slight "conflict of interest" here?
Neither "fair" nor "balanced" market can be permitted to interfere with profit,
and that is legally obliged for incorporated profit-psychopaths...
We are legally steers, and the corporate regime is properly our parasite, or our farmers, take your conceptual pick.
Cheers,
All video game reviews suck.
Luckily, so do all video games.
Here is an idea, pay consumers to review purchased items. There is a monetary value to well thought out reviews, so should anyone give them away? This would be relatively easy for someone like Amazon to implement. They can even pay a premium based on how usefull other users found particular reviews.
I think this is an excellent move by Amazon to counter the trend of authors either sock puppet praising their own works or trashing those of their competitors. It's naive to assume that all authors are noble and impartial.
See for example : http://abcnews.go.com/International/crime-writer-rj-ellory-caught-faking-amazon-reviews/story?id=17143005
The critics can still critique the books in their own publications, articles or even blog post. At least that way the criticized author has an opportunity to respond (if he wishes) to the criticism by pointing/linking to it and issuing a rebuttal.
Others before me have already pointed out the difficulties authors have in responding to critical Amazon book reviews.
When I think of PIC books, the only names that come to mind are Ibrahim, Morton and Wilmshurst. Any chance it's one of them?
I'm reading a lot of comments above where people are saying that the average consumer's opinion isn't worth shit. I beg to differ. When I wrote my book, I didn't write it for the critics, the reviewers, the professionals--I wrote it for people to read and enjoy the story I made up. When someone has read my book and liked it enough that they wanted to say to the world, "Hey! I really enjoyed reading this book!" That means a lot to me! It tells me that the effort I put into writing that story was worth it.
The occasional negative review is going to happen. Often these are self-important people that feel the need to let everyone else know how important they are, and they are going to snipe at any flaw they can find: "The author used 'palatable' instead of 'palpable' in the fourth chapter. Clearly he doesn't know how to write! Don't buy this book!" Such comments are so ridiculously petty, they can be ignored. Now, if someone made the comment, "I felt that Character-A wasn't very well thought through and his development was kind of weak," and then went on to explain their position, you can be sure that I will pay attention to something like that and look into it. Good constructive criticism is good to act upon. It might be too late for one book, but you can be assured I'll try not to make a similar mistake on the next book. There are also going to be those who don't like a book because it just isn't to their taste. To that, I can only say, "Thank you for your patronage. You'll probably not want to buy the next book, but thanks for at least giving me a try." As an author, I do consider what a negative reviewer has to say. It doesn't feel as nice as when I get a great review, but it may help me improve what I'm doing.
As far as peer reviews are concerned, if Walter Hunt, Spider Robinson, Neal Stephenson or Ursula LeGuin read my story and said they liked it, I would be absolutely thrilled to receive such an endorsement from such established authors! On another level, If Oprah Winfrey piped up and said she liked my book, I would probably be doing handsprings in my front yard. What? You think Winfrey's opinion is worthless? Consider this: When Oprah says she likes a particular book, she has over 30 million fans that will immediately go out and buy that book to read it for themselves. To an author, that is the equivalent of getting a $1 million dollar check in the mail--because that is exactly what happens! You wake up the next morning to discover that you went from 2,000 copies sold to 750,000 copies sold. With my book at $4.99 and me getting 70%, that means in 60 days Amazon would be dropping a cool $2.6 million into my bank account.
What is at issue with Amazon is that people were gaming the system. Of note, the author R.J. Ellory admitted to writing false reviews over the past several years. He's not the only one. There have been many others over the past several years. The opinion of a peer author in a given genre carries huge weight with readers. And that opinion can make or break another author, especially if that author is new and struggling to gain readership. To have someone purposefully sabotaging another author for their own gain is reprehensible. Sadly, there are unscrupulous people and they are going to pull every dirty trick they can to get ahead.
Things like this do weigh heavily on me. I told family and friends not to post a review because they know me, but because they read my story and actually liked it. If they want to blog, tweet, or post about my story, go ahead and tell people that they know me and want to promote my book to help me. I also told my friends not to buy my book because they are my friend; buy it because they want to read the story. I realize that my story will not be to everyone's taste, and I don't want them buying it because they feel obligated to do so out of loyalty.
Is Amazon correct in their move? T
Whew! This water sure is cold!
They could (gasp) pay professional reviewers, who could be monetarily penalized/ blacklisted if they were found to be taking bribes. But that would be counter to the spirit of the age, which started out by promising to liberate the independant voice, but ended up by drowning any and every manifestation of indivduality in the interests of corporate profits.
What about an expert system. Ignore the obvious, dumping the text of the book in. How about building one to analyse the value of the gestalt user, as well as the individual review. I would assume there will be domains of better and worse reviews, analogous to human expertise that is basically universal. This would be an ideal implemenation for fuzzyCLIPS (I believe). I've always meant to look into this field, but never have, so I may be wrong.
"Expert" reviewers are usually horrible at reviewing anything. Just look at "expert" film reviewers which more often than not review a movie very different than the general public.
I would rather have the crowd-sourced opinion of 100 non-experts than of 1 "expert" review anything.
I'd rather read reviews from people who don't have a horse in the race. It make sense that an author might be biased toward their own work, or slag the work of others to make theirs look better.
Why do I get .99 cent pieces of plastic Chinese shit when I search for 140, 145 and 150 watt monocrystalline solar panels?
The most valid reviews remain those that experts are getting assigned and paid to write by the senior editors of the best-respected online journals. By definition, if a site is a bookseller like Amazon that offers readers the opportunity to share views publicly, others reading these views will consider them in the spirit in which they're offered up by the site owner - to sell books.
I think the real fix is pretty obvious: verified ids + full disclosure + penalities
Verified IDs can be done a number of ways, most likely credit card auth, or possibly via something like Google+. (Needless to say, there is no way to do this that won't rub someone the wrong way, because they all involve centralized agencies... you "web of trust" guys, this is your queue, but please explain how you're going to get something that hasn't taken-off for decades to work now).
The "full disclosure" bit is also obvious: you have a TOS that requires you explain (at a minimum) any finacial connection that might bias your opinions.
The "penalities" bit is trickier: we need the courts to start recognizing intentionally deceptive behavior on the internet as a form of fraud, and not just "guerilla marketing" or "the way politics works" or some such.
I've been saying this for years, now, anything that doesn't work this way (and that's nearly everything, including slashdot) is just a part of the THE_TOY_WEB.
The standard counter-argument is that if you impose any user-restrictions at all, your traffic drops off by a factor of a 100 or more, but I fail to see how this is such an insurmountable difficulty. Reducing the number of comments on, say, New York Times columns by a factor of 100 wouldn't greatly disturb me, and myself I'd prefer it if the political operatives were required to label themselves.
I'm sometimes wonder if there might be something clever you can do with privileges that ramp up if you're willing to pay a nominal fee and not incidentally, verify who you are.
I think the real fix is pretty obvious: verified ids + full disclosure + penalties
Verified IDs can be done a number of ways, most likely credit card auth, or possibly via something like Google+. (Needless to say, there is no way to do this that won't rub someone the wrong way, because they all involve centralized agencies... you "web of trust" guys, this is your queue, but please explain how you're going to get something that hasn't taken-off for decades to work now).
The "full disclosure" bit is also obvious: you have a TOS that requires you explain (at a minimum) any financial connection that might bias your opinions.
The "penalties" bit is trickier: we need the courts to start recognizing intentionally deceptive behavior on the internet as a form of fraud, and not just "guerrilla marketing" or "the way politics works" or some such.
I've been saying this for years, now, anything that doesn't work this way (and that's nearly everything, including slashdot) is just a part of the THE_TOY_WEB.
The standard counter-argument is that if you impose any user-restrictions at all, your traffic drops off by a factor of a 100 or more, but I fail to see how this is such an insurmountable difficulty. Reducing the number of comments on, say, New York Times columns by a factor of 100 wouldn't greatly disturb me, and myself I'd prefer it if the political operatives were required to label themselves.
I'm sometimes wonder if there might be something clever you can do with privileges that ramp up if you're willing to pay a nominal fee and not incidentally, verify who you are.
You make a great point here. There are other sites around which were more focused on being the de-facto "go to" site for product reviews, but IMO, many wound up cheapening their value in an attempt to keep earning enough revenue to survive.
Great example is epinions.com. A long time ago, I joined the site and became a reviewer. Basically, I could log in, do a search for the exact make/model of practically anything I'd purchased recently, and write up a full review on it. Then, I'd earn royalty checks every month as the review was read by others X number of times.
Over time though, I saw the quality of the site drop in several respects. More and more often, I'd try to locate a product to review, only to find it would either pull up in the search but not be eligible to review at the time, or it would simply not come up at all. (I can only assume this is because the site started becoming more selective about reviews they'd accept, because they weren't getting compensated for providing the review content for some products.) Then, I started seeing copies of their site's reviews reposted in other places. This may or may not be their fault (potentially they were just a victim of "site scrapers" stealing their content to repost as their own). But it happened often enough, I'm sure many people searching for product reviews of a specific item on Google were winding up reading the epinions content in other places and never realizing it came from their site initially.
Amazon has the combination of a huge number of product buyers and a great search engine to locate specific products. That makes them a very functional product review site - even if that's only of secondary importance to them. Without resorting to a paid subscription to something like Consumer Reports, where a whole team of people do extensive testing of products to provide "professional reviews" in all cases, I don't see how it's possible to compete with Amazon in this area anymore?
...is the dominant and default model for reviewing work so why is this suddenly a problem for Amazon.
As an author, I benefit from positive and negative reviews alike from my peers and so, hopefully, do my readers.
I review books that I have read from Amazon. My reviews are skewed because I only buy books that I'm probably going to like. If I review a piece of crap, I rate it one star, but then I avoid that genre/author. I also write and some of my books are on Amazon. I can do a better job reviewing books in my genre because I understand what makes a good story in that genre. When I buy a book I look at the reviews and the inside random reading. The reviews are actually more useful. I can get an idea of the what the story is about from the reviews, not just a dumb rating.
I read about the one lady who gave all those good reviews and she _is_ a hack even if she does read 5 books/day like her husband says. She isn't _reading_
Nevertheless, if just random people wrote reviews, I still suspect most of them would be in the 4/5 range. I've written reviews on several sites. I only do that for books I like. Why even waste the time for books I don't like?
I'm not defending Amazon, just managing expectations of real life reviewing.
Somebody needs to tell Kat Herding.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Ignore the stars. Read the review and rate the rater. If the review is literate and intelligent then it has value for deciding about the book.
Erroneus/john b wilcox: When you eat is your dish a wheelbarrow? Your fork a pitchfork?? Your spoon a shovel??? Jesus you're FAT http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3345911&cid=42414637 Does your bed use chevy truck coil springs and struts to hold your fat ass off the floor too? Hahahaha. No wonder you said this "Oh... to eat pizza again..." by erroneus (253617) on Saturday December 22, @05:20PM (#42371769) from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335159&cid=42371769 you disgustingly fat hog.
Probably too simple a suggestion, but it certainly makes sense to me. Amazon knows if it has shipped product X to user Y - only allow a review from Y on X if it has.