Amazon's Idiotic Customer Review Policy

[deborahjross]

Tech Crunch comments on the recent hubbub regarding The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, which received numerous 1-star customer reviews because it was not yet available in a Kindle edition. These people hadn't even read the book and were using the reviews as a way of punishing the author for something he had no control over.

I think the issue of bullying via poor amazon.com reviews is much broader. Paul Carr, author of the article, writes:

Amazon’s book review policy has long been a bugbear of mine, and most other authors’. Too often, especially with controversial authors, the most negative reviews come from people who haven’t even read the book in question. Their anger, and the resulting one-star review, is simply a statement of general antipathy towards the author and everything they do. I know of several authors who have had to ask Amazon to take down libelous one-star reviews that focus on their gender, their race, their political views and almost any other aspect of their character.

How many books have gotten poor overall ratings on Amazon because a handful of readers objected to (AKA were out to get) the author or the subject material. All too often, I've seen scathing comments that had nothing to do with the merits of the book but were thinly disguised attacks because the book dealt with, for instance, GLBT issues. (Cases in point: Vera Nazarian's Northanger Abbey With Angels and Demons, the beautifully done riff on Emma, James Fairfax by Adam Campan, and my own Hastur Lord.)

Do such reviews hurt or help sales? Are prospective buyers intelligent enough to tell when a review is an honest reaction by someone who has read and thought about the book or a politically-driven smear campaign? Are you more or less likely to buy a book that has such reviews? Or is any buzz, positive or negative, a good thing?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

It has to be said I rarely read the reviews, but the ad hominem kind are cruel, unnecessary and irrelevant, and I'd prefer it if Amazon took them down.

[meirwen.livejournal.com]

When the readers of reviews actually rate the reviews, it is helpful. I do think that Amazon should be more...proactive in policing the reviews so that any review where it was clear that A) the reviewer was not speaking about the work, or B) the reviewer hadn't actually read the work, were taken down. I also really object to the small set of authors who write 5 star reviews of their own work. I suppose I should be grateful that they use their own names.

When I was writing the occasional review over there, a few of my reviews got tagged as "useful." For awhile after that I got requests from Amazon to write more of them. I stopped, mostly because I got lazy. Frankly, I tend to ignore the book reviews. The DVD reviews can sometimes help me decide between different versions of a DVD. I find them less useful for books.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

Good point about whether other readers found the pointlessly negative reviews helpful.

[rosehelene.livejournal.com]

When buying things on Amazon, I look at the text of high reviews and low reviews, to get a sense of what people are reacting to. I don't know how unusual I am, though.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

Good strategy. I tend to pay more attention to reviews of gadgets (how well did it work? how durable was it?) than books. Books are, after all, a matter of taste. Not many reviewers can say, "This was well done but not my cup of tea."