Anyway, let’s do some math.

Harriet seems to review roughly 6 books every day. Let’s now assume that her seed-reading abilities are such that she can read a book in just 60 minutes. For a 360 page book, that’s 1 page every 10 seconds- and a lot of books have many more pages than that. Even if she could keep that up, it would take her 6 hours EVERY DAY to read the books, then review them. Plausible? I think not.

In any case, just to confirm, something is indeed up. A quick internet search uncovered these two links:
http://thebestreviews.com/user5
http://harrietklausner.wwwi.com/
Apparently Harriet’s speed reading is not her only demonic power- she can also shapeshift!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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?

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.