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Are Amazon Vine Reviews of Technical Books a Joke?

Posted by timothy on from the you-should-try-the-craiglist-personals dept.

First time accepted submitter jasax writes "As an Amazon frequent buyer, I rely quite a lot on reviews of the books I want. However, some caution is in order: the (bad) quality of Amazon's reviews and reviewers under the Amazon Vine program has already been news in Slashdot. Today I was shocked by a practical result of that program. This second edition (published in 2012) of a very specialized system identification book has 12 reviews: the oldest (dated 2007) certainly targets the first edition. The remaining 11 reviews are all from 'Vine Reviewers' (VRs). All seem to be ignorant of what 'System Identification in the Frequency Domain' really is. None of the reviews is tagged with a 'Verified Amazon Purchase'; most (if not all) are 'small talk reviews' peppered with technical phrases cloning the publisher's book description, and some of the reviews are ridiculous, to say the least. If this sample of reviewing by VRs really is the norm, then the bottom line is that the Vine program is totally irrelevant and unreliable — at least for technical books."

2 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Read the "bad" reviews by oldhack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Read the three- and two-star reviews. They give you both good and bad. Large part of five- and one-star reviews are crap.

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
  2. Vine rules require reviewing all products by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As I had no idea what the "vine reviewers" was about, I read the amazon definition. And it says that: "Once they are invited into the program, to maintain their status as a Vine Voice, they must review *all* of the selected products within 30 days of receipt...".

    So once in the program you get a nice flow of interesting free books related to your topics of interest. But apparently you *must* enter a review for each book that Amazon sends you, or the flow of books stops. The outcome is obvious - particularly for technical books that not every reader will understand. But even for normal books, people can sometimes just be busy - resulting in rushed/content-free reviews.

    So not the reviewers' fault really, just stupid rules from Amazon. Requiring reviewers to review *half* of the books sent would probably produce a better outcome..