Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Remember when I posted the sad story of a bestselling writer trashing his competition in bogus reviews? Well, it seems that Amazon is doing something about it.

Salon and other sources report that Amazon is deleting book reviews made by authors. That’s right. Deleting them. Poof. Gone. Nothing. And from now on authors will be banned/prohibited from posting reviews on books. That’s right! “The Evil Empire” is censoring my words and opinions! Egad! Zounds! Help! Help! I’m bein’ repressed!!

Actually, I’m fine with it.

The problem Amazon is trying to solve is this:

• Like Mr Ellory from my earlier post, authors are going out and trashing their competition with one-star reviews.
• Authors are colluding to post glowing five-star reviews on each other’s books.
• Authors are logging in under pseudonyms and posting five-star reviews on their own books.

In fact, one of the books I’ve been reading (on the subject of optimized marketing strategies for the Kindle) specifically talks about using author reviews as a marketing tool (though I rush to clarify the author does not suggest any of the unethical and downright dishonest behavior of the above bullets.)

This is, it seems, a fairly big deal, especially in the e-book/Kindle marketplace, big enough for Amazon to take pretty drastic measures. Of course, as with All Things Amazon, there hasn’t been any formal declaration or any display of data to back this up. It’s a simple action by fiat; they can do it and therefore they will do it.

Is it overkill? Yes, even if they only limit this to reviews in the e-book venue. Think about it: I, as a registered author on Amazon, will not be able to post a review on any book, regardless of whether it is a direct competitor of my books or not. I can’t review Alice Hoffman’s books, or the new translation of Madame Bovary, or the latest manual of Oracle SQL. This doesn’t seem fair, and in truth, it isn’t. Amazon’s assumption is that I will partake of this unethical behavior, that I am not to be trusted, and so they’re blocking me from the entire venue.

So, why am I not up in arms, screaming bloody censorship? Because I know that, in the grand scale of things, my opinion of Alice Hoffman’s latest book (which I am enjoying, by the way) will not hurt or hinder her sales to any degree. Because I can still post my opinions on other websites, on Facebook, and here in this blog. And because I understand that, for Amazon, it’s a good business decision.

Amazon has a ready-made databank with their Kindle Direct Publishing and Author Central web services. These give them a quick, easy way to pull together identifiers on a lot of authors, and these identifiers can be used quickly to ban a large group of people who might be tempted to write bogus reviews. Is it a perfect solution? Hardly, but it addresses a large portion of the problem. To do otherwise would cost thousands of programming hours, and even then it wouldn’t be a perfect solution.

There are plenty of things I don’t like about Amazon, but this one I can live with.

k