There was a large and energetic reaction to last Sunday’s article about a service that allowed writers to commission five-star reviews of their books. Some readers were shocked that the world of online reviews was pervaded by fakery and insincerity. “Sure puts a damper on online shopping,” wrote one. Said another: “This practice is the review equivalent of doping.” But just as with sports doping, others were not surprised and said it would be impossible to eradicate.
Log-rolling, of course, has been going on forever. Anthony Trollope’s 1875 satire, “The Way We Live Now,” opens with Lady Carbury soliciting a boost for her new efforts: “I have taken care that you shall have the early sheets of my two new volumes to-morrow, or Saturday at latest, so that you may, if so minded, give a poor struggler like myself a lift in your next week’s paper. Do give a poor struggler a lift. You and I have so much in common, and I have ventured to flatter myself that we are really friends!”
If you’re not sucking up like Lady Carbury, a reader named Porter suggested, you are just not trying:
“As a writer (under another name) I have many other writer/friends who ask me to post reviews on Amazon and Good Reads ALL the time. I know they expect a 5 star review. Of course, they are sending emails out to all 1,500 or 15,000 of their facebook friends or people in their address books at the same time. They would be fools not to. Nobody wants to cross anybody else, in hopes of good reviews when their own books hit the store, virtual or otherwise … Over the years I have seen mediocre books become hot sellers because the writers are dogged marketers, and not shy about asking for reviews (or booking themselves readings). Great or nearly-great books have languished.”
Many readers wondered what Amazon’s responsibility was. Shouldn’t the retailer “be spending more effort and money to fix this?” one reader asked. “They make a profit off these reviews so I would think they have some responsibility to make sure they are honest, or at least flag the most egregiously dishonest reviews. It would be *very* easy for them to write a computer program to do this.”
I’ve tried to talk to Amazon about this, but in general it is unwilling to discuss — well, just about anything, in my experience. An executive there briefly dismissed the problem, telling me that it would be easy to fake one or two reviews but when an item had hundreds, you could trust that the reaction was authentic. Then I wrote about a case for the Kindle Fire where the manufacturer was secretly refunding the price if readers wrote a favorable review. Just about every review of that case was fake, and there were hundreds.
On the basis of that story and others, I got a lot of messages from Amazon customers about suspicious review activity. Amazon, it seems, is not overly interested in policing its own site. Authors buying book reviews to establish their credibility is one thing; manufacturers trying to juice sales of their new products is much worse.
There’s a larger point here. Technology companies visibly improve people’s lives and sometimes talk about their higher purpose (think Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto) but in the end they are profit-seeking corporations. Amazon may in some ways be replacing the public library, but unlike the libraries of yore, it is not a public service. It exists to sell things.
So what, in the end, can readers of reader-generated reviews implicitly trust? Very little, I’d suggest, except of course for the critiques at leasthelpful.com, which bills itself as “daily dispatches from the Internet’s worst reviewers.” These notices, most of which seem to have been posted on Amazon, are usually completely bananas but clearly from the heart. Here are two reviews reprinted verbatim:
From a review of “Lord of the Flies”: “The whole plot of the story is the same as ‘Lost’ so that is kind of cool.” But not cool enough: “My little tip to the auther is never write another book. I would rather read cifford the dog.”
And here’s an unusual take on the child’s tale, “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” “I read this book and I became sick. What could a child possibly learn from a book like this? With the last sentence being, shes dead of course! This should be taken off the market and the auther penalized.”
Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/reviewing-the-reviewers-story/?partner=rss&emc=rss