Amazon.com Customer Reviews: A Growing Problem

Someone just wrote me through book-blog.com recommending a book. I'll not name the book here. But I responded to this person at some length because I'm becoming increasingly annoyed by a growing problem at Amazon, the apparent scamming of the reviewer system by "one-shot reviewers," that is, people who write in and typically leave five-star reviews for a book, and who never write another review. This could be legitimate, of course--someone may really have been moved to post their sole review at Amazon by a book they loved--and if the review is a thoughtful one, then no suspicion should attach to it. But very often a book will have several one-shot five-star reviews to its name, and those not particularly insightful. (For example, one review of the book this person recommended to me reads, in its entirety, "Great read, intriguing, full of suspense and wonderful character development, left me wanting to read more.") There may be other clues, too, that a review is not trustworthy, such as that it and other questionable reviews were posted on the same day, or very close to one another. And in that case one suspects that someone (maybe the author, maybe the author's friends, maybe the publisher) is attempting through deceptive means to promote a book.

In short, if you're looking up a book on Amazon these days you cannot necessarily trust that the customer reviews you're reading are legitimate. You need to look at the reviewers's review histories, which is onerous.

Amazon needs to do something about this problem before its customer reviews lose all credibility. In Amazon's Customer Reviews Discussion Board recently I suggested two possibile solutions, that Amazon include the number of reviews a customer has posted after his or her name, or that a color code be used to differentiate reviewers by number of reviews posted (one color for one-shot reviewers, another for those posting 2-9 reviews, etc.).

At any rate, I mention all this to draw some attention to it. I am a big fan of Amazon, and a big fan of the Amazon customer reviews, which have influenced my buying decisions enormously over the years. I don't want the system wrecked by deceptive reviewers.

Here, at any rate, is the note that I sent the person who wrote me with a book recommendation. You'll see, I think, why I found the reviews of this particular book suspect:

Hi. Thanks for writing. Here's the problem. The book you mention is published by a vanity publisher. This does not mean that it's a bad book--I'm reading one such book right now and it's excellent. But it does mean that the chances of it being very good are smaller because it has not proved itself by winning over a publisher who is willing to take a financial risk by publishing it.

More importantly, when I looked at the book on Amazon I discovered that it has three five-star reviews to its name. This in itself is suspect because of the publisher--self-published books don't attract a lot of attention--and because it hasn't been out for all that long. (Big sellers get any number of reviews right off the bat; smaller books don't.) But it gets more suspicious: each of those reviewers--two of whom hail from Arizona; two of whom published their reviews on the same day--has posted a total of only one review at Amazon in their lifetimes. This screams scam to me. Either the author's friends are creating accounts at Amazon to post reviews of his book, or the author himself may be behind it. Either way, I don't trust the reviews, and in my eyes the author becomes suspect--which is a shame, if he's not doing anything wrong. As a result, I don't want anything to do with the book.

[technorati: Amazon.com, book reviews, customer reviews]

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Comments

[Katie]

I see the point your making--it's actually something I'd never thought of before--but I also think it's unrealistic to expect Amazon to "do something about it." Of course customer reviews are not entirely trustworthy. They are, by nature, random, flukey, etc. All you need to have in order to be a reviewer at amazon.com is a valid email address. Yeah, it may be a pain to have to sort through all the reviews to decide which ones are legit and which ones are not, but that simply goes along with the territory.

[Debra Hamel]

Well, what Amazon can do about it is better address the point you mention, that all you need is to have a valid email address. The problem is that people can set up multiple accounts using free addresses and fake names. Amazon kind of tried to deal with this a while back by establishing their real name system, but--I'm forgetting the details now--that doesn't solve the problem because it doesn't eliminate the possibility of illegitimate accounts.