The saga of the Amazon review removal debacle continues. J.A. Konrath posted about it on his blog and generated quite a few comments from the authors who read his blog.
TechDirt posted an interesting article about the subject as well. Zachary Knight, the author of the post opens his article with this statement:
"For a while now, there has been a bit of a kerfuffle at Amazon over so
called "sock puppet reviews" or reviews purchased by an author to help
pad their books' rankings. We hadn't been covering any of it because,
frankly, it was a non-story. There never was a threat to the publishing
industry and it was always questionable how widespread the problem
really was. Additionally, the idea that a writer would have to pay to
get reviews was just a sign that those writers held no real confidence
in their work."
Amazon works very hard to be customer centered. Removing false reviews of the books and products Amazon sells is probably the right thing to do. But removing only positive reviews while leaving false negative reviews is not fair to authors and publishers. There has to be balance of some sort.
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