I don’t know why I would even bother listening to the hoi polloi for literary recommendations but I find myself doing it anyway. I can’t tell you how many books with 300 reviews and an average of 5 stars still sucked - and they aren’t all pulp either.
After a time, I seemed to notice that everytime I saw a “top reviewer” status next to a name, the review was invariably 5 stars. I decided to check out my top reviewer bias theory and punched up all the reviews for the numero uno top reviewer. She had reviewed almost 4000 books. I just took a gander at the first 50 - 40 of which were given 5 stars, 10 given 4 stars. Not a single clunker among them. She must really know how to pick them books.
Also, have you ever looked at the “X out of Y found this review helpful” indicator at the top of every review? Funny how no one ever finds a negative review helpful.
Sorry, just had to vent after reading some godawful book recommended by the Amazon Review’s Cabal.
Oh, there’s times where the negative reviews are considered helpful.
I do enjoy those folks who use the amazon reviews as sounding board for their blind disgreement with the author. Look at Gary Posner or James Randi’s books for exmaple.
I am an Amazon book reviewer. I really enjoy it. And yes, I have gotten a lot of “helpful” votes for 1 star (and 2, 3, 4) star reviews.
I try to review books (and things) that I feel I am qualified to review. For instance, I am an artist, so I have reviewed many art and drawing books. I use my real name in these reviews, and a few times I’ve seen that people have looked me up on Google (and once or twice even emailed me, using the Google search). I have an art tutorial site so if someone bothers to look me up, they will see that I do at least sorta know what I’m talking about. That’s why a few art books that I blasted got many “helpful” votes. I try to be very specific in explaining why people should avoid these certain books. (I always recommend others instead, of course.)
I also have “reviewed” some computer equipment and devices too. Because I was able to be specific about what kind of system I had, what OS I had, and how the device worked on my system, people found this helpful. Why wouldn’t it be? And why would I lie?
I also find others’ reviews helpful, and rarely have I been disappointed. I’ve avoided a lot of clunker books and equipment that way.
The gadget & kitchen stuff reviews are the best ones. Lots of honest reviews there. Especially on highly discounted items. Seeing all of the grumpy one star reviews helps explain why that $1300 expresso maker is discounted to $500 now.
Also the “reviews” posted for the vibrating Harry Potter broomstick were a riot.
I’m pretty sure that none of his reviews are intended to be taken seriously. If any are, he’s out of luck as far as I’m concerned, but then I basically ignore the Amazon reviewers anyway for precisely the reasons you mentioned.
No, Raddick is not serious. He’s one of my favorite reviewers, even though he is rated about 400 ticks higher than me.
For a long time, someone reviewed the “Family Circus” books, and they were hilarious, free-form streams of subconsciousness. Amazon took a bunch of them off, but sometimes, one slips through.
Yes, I’ve reviewed about 125 books on Amazon, and my opinions’ all over the board. The #1 reviewer Kid mentioned is Harriet Klausner. She used to review mysteries for the dorothyl list, and publish at least 2 or 3 a day. Apparently, she is on disability and does little else but read. Shows what someone with moderate talent and a lot of drive can accomplish.
Anyway, I would never base a purchase on just one reviewer. I have to read as many of them as I can, and usually you can separate the wheat from the chaff. A well-argued, detailed review will give me the information I need about a book, and sometimes, what bothers the reviewer doesn’t bother me, so I take that into account as well.
Does Amazon have a habit of rejecting negative reviews? Neither of mine ever showed up even though I avoided gratuitous insults and even cited the pages I thought were flawed.
I have given some 1 star reviews, and they’ve gone through fine. I wonder if perhaps my addition of “Don’t get this book, get this other (far better) book instead.” helped. Or perhaps not. I’ve seen plenty of 1 star reviews that had no such alternative recommendations.
I’ve been reviewing on Amazon.com for two years and am really annoyed at the “Is this review helpful to you” system. I’ve always been honest in my reviews, and have given quite a few negative reviews, but inevitably some die-hard fan of the item in question will stop by the page and think "This thing is so great that any negative review must be wrong " and click “No.” As a result, my 250 well written, insightful reviews keep me at rank 566 while idiots with 120 one-sentence - but positive - reviews shoot up to the 200’s or 300’s.
I e-mailed Harriet Klausner once and complained that I was tired of her giving pulp romance novels 5-stars and ignoring real literature entirely. I never received a reply. I’m really sick of her using the same complimentary words in all her freakin’ masterpieces of syncophantism. The whole fucking world is “delightful”, “strong” and “classic” to that witch. This is bringing back painful memories of my high-school days working in a bookstore. I thought I’d be helping the world appreciate literature, but my store - Waldenbook’s - kept ordering me to peddle meaningless bestsellers that will be forgotten in a year’s time.
Unu, she sees that kind of criticism all the time. Since she’s been toiling away at this for years, I suspect that her bar for criticism is a lot lower than most people.
Most people, once they’ve read a few of her reviews, catch on real quick that she is an unreliable reviewer.
My nasty reviews have stayed up so far. My only complaint is that they can’t let me stuff the ballot box for my own reviews.
My favorite reviews was for some woman’s terrible fantasy series about Atlantis. I was sent a review copy and found it to be a horrid novel. Out of curiousity, I checked her book on Amazon.
Odd, that. The book wasn’t even published yet, and she had four positive, anonymous reviews, all from Texas. Where she lives. Hmmmm.
Amazon has since banned putting up pre-publication reviews.
A fun game to play on Amazon.com: Pull up the listings for the movie “Battlefield Earth”. Scour through the listings until you find a positive review. Check said reviewer’s other reviews on Amazon. Guffaw at how many of them also positively reviewed “Dianetics”. Reread the “Battlefield Earth” review, with this in mind. Repeat as necessary.
Some of those Raddick reviews are painfully funny. I think I thought he was serious about some because of a common thread in book selection. After looking further that clearly isn’t the case.
Interesting to see how many of you knew immediately that I was referring to Harriett Klausner and that many of you knew of her exploits. Funny, I just punched up any old book to find a top reviewer to test my “theory” and it just happened to be her.
It would be nice to see a reform of reviewer ranking on Amazon.com. As I’ve said, the current system enables people to lower the rank of anyone who thinks differently than they do about an item. I’d like to see a reviewer ranked by the number of his reviews with the sales rank factored in. The way I see it, the bestsellers are going to get a ton of reviews anyway, but reviewers should be rewarded for reviewing little-known items (items with low sales ranks) which won’t attract as many reviewers but for which advice for buying would be helpful. As it stands now, I have a ton of reviews for obscure items (look at all the gusGus singles and Cocteau Twins EP’s I just reviewed), but not too many people are going to click on “Yes” or “No” to report whether the review was helpful. But at least I provided some advice to anyone who stops by that page, while at something like “Let Freedom Ring” by Sean Hannity (which keeps showing up on my recommendations although I’ve never reviewed or bought a political book) already has hundreds.
What’s the motivation for someone to post a review? Or to want to be a top reviewer? Is there remuneration involved? Or is it simply a need to communicate?
My favorite weirdness, lately, with the Amazon system is having picked up a book after seeing it recommended in a couple of the Best of Historical Fiction lists…and discovering that it was non-fiction. A good book, well-written…but can they not tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction?
