I absolutely love Amazon, but they need preventive measures against these forms of manipulation.
For example:
- Prevent people who haven't bought the book from Amazon to leave a review. People may still abuse the review system, but it will be less people, and they'll make the author and publisher slightly richer in the process.
- If you complain about a book not being as good as advertised, you need to provide proof. Explain in detail what is wrong with it, and provide photographic proof, a scan, or send the book back for inspection. Issue a refund by all means, but don't just trust them and pull the book from the shelves.
Right now, anyone could tank any new book published on Amazon with very little work on their part.
Requiring a purchase through Amazon would drastically cut down on the number of reviews they would get; lots of people own lots of books and movies and albums they purchased before Amazon existed and can give good reviews of them. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Amazon to shut those reviews out.
I don't think so. For a very popular book, the resources needed for this would be enormous, as there would be thousands of other, legitimate buyers.
For less popular books, noone would bother anyways.
Of course giving a bully pulpit to people who can leave consequence-free complaints and negative feedback is key to Amazon's bogus sense of "community".
So following your protocol would get rid of these useful reviews which benefit me and others.
In the case being discussed, the customers that returned it as "not as described" did in fact purchase it from amazon, otherwise they would not be able to return it to amazon. So they would still be included.
Here is a question. If you are returning a product to amazon because you don't like it, is the only way to get your shipping refunded and/or a refund at all to check the box that says "not as described"?
It sounds like some people bought the book and didn't like it so they returned it. If it's only 5 people it's not much of an organized conspiracy by "fanatics" as he suggests.
Perhaps the problem is with amazon's return policies, and perhaps they should not link "not as described" to cancellations with books from known publishers as they would be if it was sacks of golden coins sold by some independent vendor.
In a brick and mortar store, customers can evaluate more of a book than is possible on amazon. Therefore it would be reasonable for amazon to have a liberal refund policy.
As to your last point, I would have agreed, until Kindle came out, in which case with most books I can now get a free preview, which is usually enough to evaluate if a book is worth purchasing.
Last week, while browsing the Amazon page for Zed Shaw's "Learn Python The Hard Way", I noticed that the only review was a 2-star review with a comment along the lines of "I haven't read it, but since it's free on the learnpythonthehardway website, don't bother buying it on Amazon!"* I thought this was just wrong to "review" a book like this. Reviews should at least address the content of a book...
I noticed the "0 out of 4 people found this review helpful", and promptly added another "unhelpful" vote. I also decided to "report" the review (first time I clicked this button). When I came back the next day, the review had been removed. I have no idea whether other people reported it too, or whether an Amazon employee manually checked the review. But it sure seems to be effective, and I think it was useful here.
*: I haven't kept a copy of the exact comment.
That means that they need to check accusations first, before they damage their customers.
telling people to tweet his page isnt so much a protest against amazon as it is a Marketing Campaign. (a handful of re/tweets isnt going to suddenly incite action on amazons part)
That aside, I dont think i'll be buying the book of someone who cries censorship (/wolf) when he himself doesnt even know whats going on.
Perhaps they could offer to verify a book for a fee. Then again, the problem might not be widespread enough.
I think I would set up my web sites in the same way: as soon as users would push the red alert button for some item on my site, I would withdraw it from public circulation and mark it for reviewing. On the upside, once it is manually reviewed, it could not be flagged again. How else would you do it?
Leave it in place until concrete evidence is presented.
G+ vs. FB FTW!
This also isn't the first time that one of Amazon's policies has been abused... http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/2009/04/12/amazon-under-fir...
I'd say it's more about too big a sense of self-importance than anything else.
