Army of Davids gets a 1-star review at Amazon.com before it has even started shipping
Saturday, 11 February 2006 | 138 readers so far
I’m not sure how it’s possible to get a 1-star review from Amazon.com before your book is even shipping to customers, but Glenn Reynolds, the godfather of bloggers, has managed to do so. His blog, Instapundit, is the blog emulated by all hopeful new media pundits. The editorial reviews for An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths at Amazon are by some real notables, they’re rave reviews.
Therefore, it is a mystery to me why the book has an average customer review of 1-star. In fact, why does Amazon allow customers to add reviews to books which are not available yet? Review fraud is a big problem at Amazon. One book I recently purchased and read had an average review rating of three stars. But about half of those reviews were patently fraudulent. The rotten reviews were most likely left by the book’s shady author and his cronies. By the way, I leave an honest review of every book I read on Amazon.com as well as posting those book reviews here. It’s my opinion that Amazon needs to design a new process for figuring out which web surfers on their site are allowed to leave book reviews. The current system is broken.
I would propose a system where the top reviewers could vote other reviewers “off the island” so to speak. The more reviews you’ve left, and the more people who find your reviews useful, the more weight your votes have. In my perfect system, reviewers can not only vote on how good a book is, they can vote on how good a reviewer is. If a reviewer gets enough bad reviews then the sum total of that reviewer’s added content disappears from the system, or is reviewed by an Amazon.com staff member. Such a system would drastically improve the value of the service being provided by Amazon’s five-star review system.
I am keeping Army of Davids on my wish list. The 1-star rating won’t last and neither will Amazon’s flawed review system. Fix it, please.
Signed,
A David
1 February 10th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Mudville Gazette says:
head into a war zone, they typically go armed with specialized training that could save their lives if something goes wrong. Army of Davids gets a 1-star review at Amazon.com … — [The Will to Exist - in Iraq] I’m not sure how it’s possible to get a 1-star review from Amazon.com
2 March 16th, 2006 at 4:08 am
In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood says:
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