Is Harriet Klausner for real?

I think the fact that Don’s reviews are 3x as helpful says enough. Besides being at the top of the list, what is the benefit of holding the #1 spot? Are you suggesting Amazon award the spot based on the number of helpful votes? I could see how that could be rigged too, so maybe the two combined and weighted is the right approach. I does seem that she’s not helping people as much as other top reviewers.

The problem is not Harriet.

The problem is articles like this which profile her in a dark light and give the public more reason to mark her reviews as unhelpful. In order to attain a helpful rate of 8%, you either have to be illiterate or have a lot of people that hate you… I think we know where this stands.

“you either have to be illiterate or have a lot of people that hate you”

Are those the only two options?

What I want to know is, what is the motivation for doing this? Just the perverse thrill of being high on the list? Is there any kind of possibility for monetary gain?

Steve says:

“The problem is articles like this which profile her in a dark light and give the public more reason to mark her reviews as unhelpful.”

This is untrue. The public doesn’t read articles like this. Though it is possible that her amazon-savvy detractors may be “ganging-up” on her reviews, you would need to provide data to demonstrate this claim.

Joshua Porter provides relevant data and asks the right questions about incentives.

This is what happens when Quantity of submissions trumps Quality and you create an associated Leader Board.

I wasn’t even aware that such rankings existed on Amazon until I read this article. User reviews are the first things I read when I’m looking for a book on Amazon. Judging by the example posted here, I wouldn’t find Klausner’s reviews helpful at all. It just seemed like a rehash of the editorial reviews that Amazon already provides.

I’m more interested in reading a bunch of more subjective reviews and finding a common thread.

Fortunately gaming Amazon’s reviewer ranking system isn’t as dangerous to consumers as the type of gaming that occurs on eBay.

This definitely goes to the point of ranking systems, their visibility, and its affect on a community. Who knew book readers were just as petulant as those awful nerdy diggers….. wait, they read books too? what a world!

When I co-wrote a book, we were all asked to go on amazon and write positive reviews and the book publisher even had internal writers. I’ve come to take reviews with a grain of salt. To me, it’s about what other books people purchased in addition to that book. I trust the wisdom of the crowd over independent vocal users. Just me.

It’s probably fair to presume that gaming of Amazon’s reviews is fairly rife anyway, as Bud highlighted. What i’m not clear about is what she stands to gain.

> What i’m not clear about is what she stands to gain.

A bit of cash perhaps?

Btw, Harriet Klausner is remarkable, but, except for the sheer volume, she’s not unique. Check out reviewing records of other ‘Top’ reviewers on Amazon, for example Robert Morris and W.Boudville. Do these guys read the books they review? I doubt it.

There’s a lot of ‘reviewers’ of this sort on Amazon (and elsewhere, actually). They tend to review huge numbers of books and they tend to rate them all positively, four or five stars. How realistic is that? Think of it, out of, say, fifty books you read most recently, how many were five stars?

Looks like industrial-scale shilling to me. What they stand to gain we’ll never know, but hey… they must be getting something for their efforts.

I caution you to draw anything from how many negative votes Harriett’s reviews are getting. There are people who go around voting negatively on every single review she writes. They have just as little life as she does.

Not that I find her reviews helpful at all. I stopped even listening to her years ago.

I’ll say one thing for Harriet. At least she lets her “reviews” speak for themselves. There are a number of reviewers on Amazon who somehow get dozens, even hundreds, of helpful votes virtually overnight, while other reviews sit unnoticed alongside them. The problem with using helpful votes as a barometer of a reviewer’s worth is that it is an easy system to rig and hence is open to abuse. All you need is an email address to place a vote.

The book sitting at the top of the bestseller list at the moment (Birds in My Life) is an interesting case in point of how the entire system is rapidly losing credibility.

H. Klausner is another. It would be impossible for anyone to read and then write reviews for all the books that she churns out. Even the business of writing that many would take several hours a day. Moreover, her unfamiliarity with the content of the books is often obvious. It’s a shame if people are influenced by these reviews, but the website is peppered with seemingly impartial reviews written with arch motivations.

My problem with Ms. Klausner is that she never seems to read a book she dislikes. I don’t find her reviews helpful simply because she has so many 4- and 5-star reviews that I don’t trust her opinion. It’s called a bell curve, sweetie, and while most readers automatically weed out the books they’d rate at the bottom of the scale, the majority of what a discerning person reads is average or slightly above.