Anything with less than a real critical mass of reviews (less than hundreds) is way too easy to entirely game on Amazon. I wrote a book quite a few years ago on a niche tech topic. To be entirely honest, very few people read it. The positive reviews of the book were almost all from people I knew personally. Then the 1-star reviews started coming in. Each 1-star review had no actual content in the review. It was clear that the writers of these BS reviews hadn't read the book at all, since they didn't mention anything specific whatsoever. However, each of the 1-star reviews DID manage to mention a competing book that was "better". And all the bad reviews mentioned the same exact competing book. It was ridiculously obvious that someone was bashing my book to push a competing book instead, without any actual substance. At first I cared, and asked Amazon to remove the reviews, which they did. Then more BS reviews came back, I had them removed, they came back again, and eventually I just got tired and stopped caring.
If you have a few minutes to report the issues with the Perl category to Amazon, they accept "catalog feedback" through their 24/7 live chat system.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us</a><p>#1: Ignore this section, skip to #2.<p>#2: From the dropdowns, select: "More order issues", "Give Amazon feedback", "Other feedback topic". In the text box, enter "Catalog feedback".<p>#3: Click "Chat".<p>It took me around five minutes to explain that several of the books in the top 100 were incorrectly listed in the Perl category, and they happily accepted the feedback.<p>Including a direct link to the Perl category helps them tremendously:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011</a><p>And I also included a link to the post above.<p>Edit: Tell them specifically which books, in which top 100 position, are in the wrong category, so that they know which ones aren't Perl.
I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week.<p>Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:<p>Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word?<p>I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.<p>Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person (perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833</a><p>All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.<p>I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8</a><p>However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.
Web cache version, since the site is down for me:
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.p...</a><p>While not really related, I seem to run across a lot of books on Amazon that have a high number of 5 star reviews that, upon reading, are just bad. Seems to happen a lot with books by independent sci-fi authors with Kindle-only books...<p>Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.
In light of that recent article about computer-generated prose being in many cases indistinguishable from human-written, I'd say those fake reviews are likely written by a computer. Notice that they're mostly of the form "I didn't think I'd be interested in [TOPIC] but [TITLE] was really interesting and really helped me learn about [TOPIC]."
I'm also surprised that Amazon has such a poor handle on their product reviews. <i>Obviously fake</i> reviews absolutely litter the site. Speaking as only a consumer, it makes the process of purchasing much more cumbersome than it ought to be.<p>It's not reasonable to expect Amazon (or anyone, really) to detect fraudulent behavior with perfect accuracy. I have to agree with the OP, though, in that they should be able to do a lot better. Many fake reviews are <i>blatantly</i> fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics.
I don't think this is unique to Amazon.<p>I've gotten this on the iTunes app store quite a bit. Low ratings from people who don't review any other products (or if they do, it looks super spammy).<p>On top of that, the bad reviews tend to come in bunches (multiple in a day), are void of any actual useful feedback or complaints and are just vague & angry (sucks, ripoff, etc).<p>I've had decent luck with having Apple remove any that are WAY off topic, but it still sucks.<p>Google Play allows you to reply to reviews (which helps quite a bit as far as either helping the customer or correcting a misconception). I'm not sure what Amazon can change on that front.
Upvoted for visibility. A bit related : another recent article on fake Amazon reviews <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614</a> .
OP here.<p>I really can't say as much as I would like (there's stuff I can't share), but my publisher had a face-to-face with an Amazon rep and internal action was taken. Amazon's investigation is apparently over. The internal position seems to be "we're making money, there are words on pages, so there's no problem here." Amazon's investigation was short and sweet. Some bogus reviewers were removed, but Felicity — one of the worst offenders (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_c...</a>) — is still there, despite the obvious fact that these are fake reviews. Many other obviously fake reviews remain. In fact, a new fake book with fake reviewers showed up. I genuinely do not know if this response is because of a careless employee or if Amazon discourages employees from shutting down profit streams.
Much like search engines combat black hat SEO, amazon and reviews systems can do the same.<p>It would not be to hard too for amazon. Use reviews that are a 'Verified Purchase' and highly 'helpful' reviews as a training/test set. Then machine learn a weighting to every review based on the (product, reviewer, other reviews, etc features...)<p>The outcome could actually hinder tactics like this for products that game the system much like how link farms hurt sites they were propping up when Google figured out how to stop sites from gaming a search engine.
I wonder if any NLP approaches could yield an improvement on this? I immediately think of doing some NER on the review (looking for the title, authors, chapters, even specific topics) and if none of the above are mentioned, or at least not mentioned "enough", then it can be flagged for review as potential spam. Likewise, if you did sentiment analysis on a 5 star review, but the sentiment was either neutral or negative, it's likely not a very useful review.<p>I'm sure there's a lot that could be done with this, but some run of the mill NLP seems like it could at least help. I'm not sure the plausibility of this at a large scale, but it seems like an interesting problem nonetheless.
How about writing high-quality responses to the bad reviews? I have seen this done by some authors and it usually stops the meaningless reviews, since each additional spam review only creates a new opportunity for the author to present their marketing perspective via comment.<p>If this were a novel, economically hostile and unsubstantiated feedback would be considered economic warfare.
Amazon will delete spam reviews if they are reported. Reviewers and reviews get meta-reviewed, and poorly meta-reviewed reviews won't appear in the featured reviews for your book.<p>BUT that means you still need a critical mass of genuine reviewers who give your book positive reviews, and for technical books, sometimes that's hard to come by. One way to do this is to get lots of people reviewing your manuscript pre-publication. That has lots of other obvious benefits, too.<p>Reply to reviews, especially if a reader had difficulty with a code example and you can help them.
I used to love reading tech books. Now I am writing a book of my own, and there are SO many incentives to churn out a low-quality book.<p>As an author, you make very little: maybe 5% of the cover price. So money is not an incentive. You are either writing because a. it looks good on your resume, or b. you really care about this topic and feel like this book should already exist.<p>Books are sold based on number of pages, not quality of content. The publishers know that if your book has 100 more pages, they can tack on another $5 - $10 to the price. So there's heavy incentive to produce a lot of content.<p>Readers don't want to buy multiple books: they want the one book that will cover all of their needs. So they will buy mostly based on the table of contents.<p>So if you want to optimize for your own monetary gain, the best book you can write is one that is big, and has an impressive table of contents, but took very little time to write. So we end up with books that have a very poor signal to noise ratio. For example: my book has code samples in Python. A couple of readers have asked me to write an appendix that shows them how to set up Python on their computer, play with the REPL, etc. I think this is totally useless. They can google and get up-to-date information, and the appendix will be out of date soon. But it is very easy for me to write and would pages to the book.<p>So as an author, the best job you can do is pump out a bunch of fluff and then pay for reviews on amazon. It is really frustrating to see, but that's how the incentives are set up here.
Sometimes review abuse is more subtle than the example in the article given.<p>I found a recently published technical book on Amazon, which had a couple dozen five star reviews. I read a few of them, and it seemed great. The author's biography said he worked at X, a very well-known software company. I bought a paperback copy, read it, and was disappointed. The book wasn't terrible, but it wasn't written very well, and did not contain the technical depth that it appeared it would on the reviews. The book turned out to be self-published, and the technical editor was the author's boss at X. The other editors were the author's family members.<p>I went back and looked at the reviews, and found that many of the five-star reviewers worked at X, or if I couldn't figure out their employer, they happened to be located in the same metro area as X's headquarters. One of the Amazon reviewers is even mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.<p>I think all the reviewers had good intentions to help their friend and colleague, but I think it's still misleading, as you cannot expect a someone to give an impartial public review on their colleague's work.<p>All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5 star book instead of 5/5.
When I search for "perl" on amazon, I don't see any of the spam books now, so it looks like the issue is clearing up. Whether that's due to attention from Amazon or the public, I don't know.
Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books.<p>What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?
The problem isn't unique to Amazon. The same thing happens on the App stores. It really does seem like it's high time something were done about it.
So, here's the thing about Amazon rankings. They're not a meritocracy, and you might think that good reviews help you and bad reviews hurt you. They do/can! But it's closer to SEO than that. Amazon ranks things by what sells, and yes, higher-ranked things sell better, but it's more complicated than just that. Not everybody finds Perl books by looking in the Perl category. I'm looking at the third book you highlighted, about PHP. Its sales rank is 38,xxx and yours is 2xx,xxx (btw, and you may know this - the sales required to move up rankings increase exponentially, so this difference in ranking translates to quite a few sales per day). As long as Amazon believes it's about Perl, even if only tangentially so, it will rank higher in Perl than you because it's selling better. It's in their interest to market what sells better for them.<p>I learned this from fiction, but it applies to nonfiction too. First of all, books are categorized by what you put in the keywords section in KDP, if they're self-published, or by whatever your publisher put in there if you're not. Let's say you write a book about Perl and cooking. It may outsell pure Perl books because more people like cooking than Perl. It might be a great cooking book but a poor Perl book - or maybe you're lying about the Perl thing, and it's just a cookbook. But it'll top the Perl category as long as Amazon believes you that it's about Perl, and among the Perl books, it will have the highest sales rank.<p>Unfortunately, what I bet is happening is that this book is legitimately somewhat about Perl, and the author tagged it as such in the keywords. But its sales aren't coming from winning the Perl category alone; they're coming from that and PHP and beginning programming and generally from being ranked in multiple categories.<p>Your best bet to get your category back is to try to convince Amazon it's not about Perl at all. Good luck - I didn't look close enough to see if that's a reasonable claim or not.
Steps to reproduce:<p>1) Visit Fiverr [1]<p>2) Repeat<p>Sadly, I don't see very many ways to overcome these kinds of review factories. Maybe Amazon should start doing sting operations on these services.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=amazon+reviews&search_in=category&category=5&sub_category=111&page=1&layout=auto" rel="nofollow">https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&qu...</a>
I was recently on Amazon looking to purchase an item. Apparently not a lot people buy this item online, so there was very few number of reviews.<p>I got curious if the people reviewing these items are genuine buyers or otherwise, so I click through to one guy's profile (verified purchase). Turns out he posted hundreds of one liner reviews for a plethora of esoteric products(all verified purchase) all on Jan 12, 2015.<p>They are out there.
>why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?<p>This is a big problem for more than just niche books. When I tried to find a new fiction book by browsing categories I found the same books listed in every major category, i.e. it's difficult to believe the same book ought to be listed in Sci fi, horror, self help, history, and current events.
Perhaps Amazon should have two categories of reviews, one category has only reviews by verified purchasers, people who have bought the book from Amazon, and the second is all the rest. If there's a huge discrepancy between the verified reviews and non-verified, then it's obvious that something fishy is up.
<i>"why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?>"</i><p>The other thing I notice is the titles are Kindle. Why are dead-tree products, arguably a more liberal format, mixed with a e-book products that are proprietary and closed?
> Come on, Amazon, you can do a better job!<p>I'm not sure they can. There are things Amazon seems able to do well, but this certainly has never been one of them. And I don't know that anyone else at half Amazon's scale or larger has done much better.
"...I was intrigue and more interested in playing minecraft knowing different tips and tricks that can help me to win the game. "<p>Lol. <i>chuckle</i>