Amazon Readers Shorting non ebooks

amazon.com

3 points·prbuckley··3 comments

I have never seen reviewers give 1 star ratings for not supplying books in e format. Does this signal something?

Jason Kottke covered this at a higher level, where consumers are taking into account the format of the media and not just the content in their reviews (unlike your average critic working for big media).

http://kottke.org/10/03/the-new-rules-for-reviewing-media

They're leveraging what power they have from available tools (star ratings and reviews on popular commerce sites) to put pressure on the publishers.

Is it odd that Amazon doesn't denote (or possibly separate out) reviews from users that it knows purchased the book (or DVD, etc.)? Privacy concerns? The user is already expressing an opinion on something the have [ideally] consumed, thus tying it to their profile.

Maybe someone is reviewing a book that they purchased elsewhere? Whose business is it where I purchase (or check out) a book? I don't think erring on the side of privacy is a bad thing.

I was checking a book out of the library yesterday, and saw at the bottom of the screen that I have an overdue charge. I asked the librarian what book the charge was for. She pulled up my account, and then invited me over to her side of the counter, so that I could read what book I checked out. She was avoiding anyone overhearing what my reading habits are. I was pleasantly surprised.

Amazon has so many customers at this point that have probably purchased most of the books in their system, that I imagine they could remove all non-customer reviews of products and end up with a significantly better signal to noise ratio.

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