Comments on: Oops

Oops

drezdn — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:26:18 -0800

A concerned reader in St. Louis just might be Dave Eggers. A weekend glitch on Amazon Canada allowed people to see the true secret identities behind reviews on the site. [NYT Link]

By: thomcatspike

thomcatspike — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:39:21 -0800

Think they're giving "reviews" too much credit. Several sentences describing a book is like judging it by it's cover. You know the title, author and possible book plot plus, "a good read". When reading it tells all.

By: xmutex

xmutex — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:43:53 -0800

Totally highschool.

By: matteo

matteo — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:50:29 -0800

O.K., Miguel, I think you should give up, confess and repent now... btw, Eggers _was_ childish. but after all he was defending his wife, I cannot really blame him. I like to think that maybe he wouldn't have done it if it was his own book. but sometimes we can get kind of overzealous defending the people we love

By: callmejay

callmejay — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:53:20 -0800

Given the amount of money an early, positive review might mean, it'd be shocking if authors or publishers didn't try to give themselves a boost. If a system can be trivially and anonymously gamed, it probably will be.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:55:06 -0800

I'd still like to know who Henry Raddick is.

By: Peter H

Peter H — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:00:15 -0800

Hi Dave if you're reading this, BUSTED!! ... I like that Eggers admitted to it when asked, tho. And replied to it in print through email, especially. Few would admit, I'd think, since it really is the -tackiest- thing possible. I wonder how many people write reviews for themselves on amazon!? Of course, to be snarky, Eggers sort of wrote his own glowing Amazon review with the navel-gazing title of his big memoir.

By: xmutex

xmutex — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:04:59 -0800

Wait, that's Eggers's wife?

By: homunculus

homunculus — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:13:41 -0800

Another first-rate paper doll book from Tierney, this time of the first family. All of the clothes are marvelous, but nothing says "oderint dum metuant" quite like stack-heeled cowboy boots with a tux. I love Henry Raddick.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:18:20 -0800

A lot of the reviews come from sales and marketing departments it as free publicity and they have no problem creating reviews it is part of their paid job to do so. A better system is one like Cool Tools which has a much higher credibility and signal to noise ratio. Basically, it is a moderated recommendation list.

By: thomcatspike

thomcatspike — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:20:16 -0800

But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies. I wonder how many people write reviews for themselves on amazon!? The authors defended themselves by saying, the Internet, where anyone from your mother to your ex-agent can anonymously broadcast an opinion of your work, has created a more urgent need for self-defense. Is this the ethical way about doing it?

By: triv

triv — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:22:08 -0800

an alternate and non ny times link - here at the observer.

By: sgt.serenity

sgt.serenity — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:25:47 -0800

I'm really Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

By: dhoyt

dhoyt — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:34:22 -0800

Eggers has been passing off lame, disingenous writing as legitimate for years--how is this any different?

By: eastlakestandard

eastlakestandard — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:36:18 -0800

I'm really Newt Gingrich.

By: Peter H

Peter H — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 12:00:51 -0800

47 out 56 people found the following review helpful: ***** (five stars) "fierce and rewarding - the best metafilter thread of the year!", February 16, 2004 Reviewer: A reader from St. Louis, MO This metafilter thread evokes the work of other great community weblog threads of the past ten or twenty years, while still saying something new and interesting. A strong new, literary, Internet thread-scribing voice! Was this review helpful to you? (Yes) (No)

By: linux

linux — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 12:17:02 -0800

No. :D

By: raygirvan

raygirvan — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 12:25:58 -0800

a more urgent need for self-defense I doubt it. On Amazon UK at least, ratings are almost invariable skewed upward by anonymous and pseudonymous 5* reviews - particularly ones that seem to be posted specifically to argue the toss with negative reviews posted shortly before. The other promotional tactic, I strongly suspect, is authors and their cronies clicking "no" to "Was this review helpful to you?" on all the negative comments, so that positive ones appear as the header reviews. If it were up to me, I'd tweak the weighting, so that negative reviews - always a persecuted minority - contributed more toward the rating score. But then Amazon are in the business of selling books, not givng accurate assessments of whether books are worth reading.

By: pyramid termite

pyramid termite — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 12:40:31 -0800

Judging from their reviews of CDs, 90% of them are written by fan bois, so why would anyone take them that seriously?

By: dobbs

dobbs — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 12:47:06 -0800

Following that Raddick link led me to this non-Raddick review of a book called You Can Teach Your Dog to Eliminate on Command: I was bitterly disappointed with this book as I thought it would help my terrier learn to kill on command instead of controlling his number two's. The editor should have given this publication a clearer title to avoid confusion. Heh.

By: LeLiLo

LeLiLo — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 13:05:56 -0800

Funny, I was just thinking about possibly doing something like this last week (anonymously becoming "a reader from Sheboygan" or "a yachtsman in Des Moines"). I was frustrated because Amazon won't change something on my book's page. They've decided that an author's comment I made about my book, when I was trying to correct a mistake Amazon had made about a previous printing, is a review. Since I didn't give myself any stars (even if I would have, it's not an option on the author's coments form), it brought my average way down. Three 5-star comments, one 0-star comment. If anybody out there knows Dave Eggers, ask him to blurb me as well.

By: Sidhedevil

Sidhedevil — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 13:12:04 -0800

Heidi Julavits isn't Dave Eggers's wife. However, Vendela Vida, the other editor of The Believer is Dave Eggers's wife. Neither of them can write worth crap, which may be where the confusion arises. And they both have "v" in their names.

By: deadcowdan

deadcowdan — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 13:15:47 -0800

What pyramid termite just said.

By: lotsofno

lotsofno — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 13:17:27 -0800

hehe, interesting article. i loved this paragraph: The feminist author Katha Pollitt mentioned in a recent New Yorker article that she had considered anonymously posting a nasty review on her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's Amazon page, but refrained from doing so. In an interview, however, she said she had chastised a friend whose book had no reviews on Amazon when it came out, telling her to have friends to post some. The friend followed her advice, but Ms. Pollitt was disappointed. "I'm thinking what kind of friends are these? They've only written one sentence."

By: JollyWanker

JollyWanker — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 14:04:59 -0800

What's shocking to me is not that celebriscribes like Eggers would manipulate Amazon's "review" system, but rather that anyone would care. Over here in my ignorantly blissful universe, I didn't think anyone even read those, let alone made a purchasing decision based on them...

By: elwoodwiles

elwoodwiles — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 14:20:45 -0800

Eggers haters aside, this is an interesting issue from the other direction as well: writers giving bad reviews to percieved competitors out of pure spite. Tom Bissells reviews for his first (real) book show how this pettyness isn't used just to praise a book, but to try to slander it's author. It's one thing to hate Eggers, but quite another to hate anyone involved with McSweeney's.

By: Melinika

Melinika — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 18:10:05 -0800

Whoa. Just now, as I was reading the Tom Bissell reviews in the link elwoodwiles posted, all 32 of them were deleted! Heh. Guess someone at Amazon read this and wanted to clear the slate or something.

By: Slagman

Slagman — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:21:53 -0800

I think people do read the reviews and are influenced to a degree. And sometimes there's some hilarious back and forth, not only in the books sections but in the music sections. I also love it when people are obviously pimping their own product and then someone else jumps in to say, this product sucks, buy this one by my company. And there are some reviewers who actually have pretty good taste and compile lists of "if you like this sort of thing, try these" that can be kind of helpful. A good review can persuade by the telling quotation, the revealed fact, and so on. It doesn't really matter if the person is a well known critic. And who better to defend a book than the author or the author's friend. And who better to destroy it than the author's enemy?

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 23:55:57 -0800

I like the Eggers. The Eggers is good. That is all.

By: Slagman

Slagman — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 07:07:36 -0800

I don't blame Eggers or Bissell. Those ULA people are crazy stupid, plus their books suck, so they go around tearing down successful writers.

By: clever sheep

clever sheep — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 07:51:50 -0800

This sucks--now the Henry Raddick reviews are offline too. Put 'em back, Amazon! Don't you know a gold mine when you trip on one?