Are Amazon Vine Reviews of Technical Books a Joke?

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."

Comments

Read the "bad" reviews

[oldhack]

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

A++

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent article. Would read again.

Re:Amazon needs their head read.

[GryMor]

If I'm looking at a book, the reviews had better be about the book rather than one of the 100+ sellers of the book. If you want to review that particular seller, there is a separate spot for that, and low enough service ratings will tank their visibility across all of their products. "Cover damaged, terrible service" on a review of Excession is useless spam. The same review on the seller itself is helpful.

Re:Binding, hardcover, etc.

[MatheoDJ]

Perhaps there are Vine reviewers farming out their writing and receiving free products in exchange. I've been experimenting with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and a fair number of the assignments seem to be fake reviews of some sort, with improved SEO as the endgame. I've been offered HIT's (Amazon's shorthand for the small tasks often worth as little as $0.01) that require a person to write small articles or reviews, 150-500 words, using incredibly specific technical jargon or product lingo. Sometimes it's Ph.D. level stuff. I can't imagine anyone having the technical prowess and educational background necessary to write intelligently about such subjects being interested in making $0.75 to do so, but maybe that's enough money to inspire someone in Bangladesh to write meaningless positive reviews peppered with jargon, and small enough change to inspire someone in America to outsource a large number of reviews in order to increase their Vine ratings.

Vine rules require reviewing all products

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Re:Binding, hardcover, etc.

[StikyPad]

I liked how your post was concisely packed into a single sentence. It took up just the right amount of room on my screen, and I could scroll it up or down using my mouse wheel.