The Big River Review
Ethical Standards and
Reviews on Amazon.com
The Big River Review
At the Point of Sale in a Powerful Marketplace.
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In March 2012, the Harvard Business Review published What makes a critic tick? Connected authors and the determinants of book review a study of the relative veracity of professional book reviews in traditional media and consumer book reviews in online environments like Amazon. The core of the study is stated at the outset as an examination of how relationships between authors and media outlets affect the nature of book reviews in that media, as opposed to consumer reviews of the same material. Though reporting in newspapers and blogs seems to present the work as a vindication of the current Amazon review environment, the study is not about, nor does it present itself as being about, the relative veracity or reliability of the two forms of reviews in the present day.
Amazon book reviewers as reliable as professional critics, says Harvard research
Amazon Killed The Book Reviewer Star, a blog posting that acknowledges current criticism of the Amazon review environment as that of a “literary cesspool” but goes on to suggest that the Harvard study refutes the notion by finding an equivalence between professional and consumer book reviews in the aggregate because of the ultimate “wisdom of crowds. A randomly selected consumer reviewer,” says its author Gregory Ferenstein, “is no match for a professional reviewer, but the average opinion of all laymen is less biased than an expert.”
The study does not address the growing fraud, agenda fulfillment and marketing strategy in the current environment of Amazon book reviews. Nor does it seem to be about most books in the present day. Though dated March 2012 it explains at the outset that “we use a data set consisting of the 100 highest rated non-fiction books on Metacritic.com between 2004 and 2007.” Not mentioned is that at the end of that period Metacritic, an online review site with some credibility, stopped publishing book reviews for an unstated reason. The move would have been in keeping with the changes in the literary criticism environment at that time that have seen the disappearance or reduction of traditional print criticism in newspapers and magazines and the rise of Internet criticism, particularly on Amazon.
In that same year of 2007, the public relations firm Burston Marsteller signaled the beginning of the era in which we now find ourselves with the release of a survey of those it deemed “efluentials. . . opinion leaders who shape perceptions of brands, products and services, ultimately driving billions of consumer dollars.” Almost half of those surveyed believed that online criticism was driven by commercial activity and a third believed it was a serious problem. Reporting on the survey opened up the notion that anonymous online reviews may not be reliable. “ . . . it's the fraudulent reviews--positive reviews contributed by ‘readers’ paid by the company being evaluated--that worry critics and advocates alike,” wrote PC Magazine in 2008.
That was almost five years ago and since that time the cautions of the late last decade have evolved into an Amazon review environment that, if not a cesspool, is certainly an Alice’s Wonderland of games and illusions. On the day before this piece was written the writer received this exact pairing in his daily Google alert on the term Amazon Reviews:
How Amazon killed book critics
New research from the Harvard Business Review shows that the aggregate rating of Amazonreviewers are every bit as good as professional book critics.
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The Harvard study does not show that aggregate Amazon reviewers are as good as professional critics. It sets its criteria in an obsolete review environment from another era, based on a selective vs. random sample of the top 100 books of the 85,000 it says are published each year, and compares it to . . . what? It seems to have compared criticism in professional environments of the top 100 books published “with consumer reviews from Amazon.” They are not further defined. Were they from the same years of 2004-2007? If so, they are not related to the present day. If not, they are not related to the professional sample. Things have changed a lot since then.
What the Harvard study is clearly about is the relationship between authors, professional reviewers and media outlets vs. an unidentified group of Amazon reviewers for a few years in the first decade of the century. It may imply that its insights are transferable to the present day, but it does not claim to be about fraud, vengeance and commercial marketing in the Amazon book review community as it is found in 2012. That is a subject that still needs to be better understood and dealt with, hopefully and preferably by Amazon itself, before book criticism is destroyed at the professional level and reduced to meaninglessness at the “consumer” level.
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Authors and publishers have Amazon.com to thank for an expanded marketplace for their products, and for its leadership in the inevitable development of new delivery methods for intellectual property.
New Gatekeepers
An important feature of Amazon’s history in the marketing of books and other media has been the development of a “community” of reviewers of those products intended to move the power of review out of the hands of gatekeepers like newspapers and magazines and into the hands of those who read and use media products. All can agree that the evolution is a good thing. A 2010 series of essays in the New York Times, for example, sets out some of the parameters for thinking about criticism in the digital age.
A price to pay?
But the quid pro quo for increasing democracy in the review of intellectual property has been an increasing loss of intellectual honesty and ethics in the review process. In the case of Amazon, that loss of standards undermines many books and other media at their most important point of sale.
Amazon is not “just another” market for books and other media. It is the largest market over the lifetimes of listed and delisted books and similar products. That may change with the growth of competitor websites, but the power of that marketplace and its review community should be no less subject to review than the products it sells.
Rhetoric at War in the Amazon Book Review Community.
| The Effect of Online Product Reviews Pew Internet’s ongoing study of the impact of the Internet looked into Online Product Research in 2010 finding that 78% of Internet users conducted at least occasional product research on the medium, and nearly one-third posted product reviews and comments online. It’s no surprise that the general marketing of products increasingly looks to development of strategies for positive Internet reviews. The consulting company Power Reviews, for example, released a study in 2010 that looked into the way consumers accessed and responded to Internet reviews and information. It found that half of those surveyed used the Internet to make purchasing decisions, one-third spent more than half an hour researching reviews, and 83% of all users were led to feel more confident in the choices they made. |