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Not everyone who buys a copy even bothers to read the review. If it's a book that the customer already knows they want (which is probably often the case with th
by tjr 16y ago
Not everyone who buys a copy even bothers to read the review. If it's a book that the customer already knows they want (which is probably often the case with the Harry Potter books), why read the review? Just buy the book.
And I know that I for one usually don't upvote a review, even if I did find it helpful. I don't mean to be intentionally rude, I just somehow haven't gotten in the habit of doing that. So the number of votes on a review isn't an indication of the number of people who found the review helpful, but rather, the number of people who both found the review helpful and took the time to vote it up.
That said, yes, Amazon's immense customer base makes even tiny percentages of users contributing out to be useful. But they weren't always so large. I've heard that the main way they became the prominant online bookseller was precisely because they offered a review mechanism, at a time when other online bookstores did not, or offered a more feeble review system. Since it's so easy to add a nice review system to an online store today, that feature alone won't be enough anymore.
- wallflower 16y ago> Since it's so easy to add a nice review system to an online store today, that feature alone won't be enough anymore. It's not the feature. I'm convinced it is is the sheer volume. Much like Arn from MacRumors says to monetize a website - first you need traffic. Traffic then monetization. Not monetization then traffic. Target has the exact same software Amazon.com has - as the result of a 2000-era licensing agreement. I had to sort by highest rated to even get a Harry Potter item with reviews: http://www.target.com/Potter-Half-Blood-Prince-Widescreen-Dual-layered/dp/B002T6423Y/ref=sc_qi_detailbutton http://www.target.com/Potter-Half-Blood-Prince-Widescreen-Du...
- boundlessdreamz 16y agonitpick: "then" not "than" as in "Traffic then monetization". I don't mind it, but it is better to correct it as it is quite jarring to many people
- wallflower 16y agoFixed it. Thanks. Here's the article I was paraphrasing: "The secret to success on the internet can be boiled down to one simple accomplishment: building traffic. That’s it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money." -Arn, MacRumors.com http://normalkid.com/2008/06/26/traffic-power-money/ http://normalkid.com/2008/06/26/traffic-power-money/
- tzs 16y agoIt's even worse than that. It's not the Harry Potter books (plural) they were talking about--it was just one particular Harry Potter book, book 7, which was the last book in the series. How many people are going to read 6 books in a series, and then need a review to decide if they want to read the 7th? About the only reason I can think of one might check reviews before buying is to see if there are any goofs, like chapters printed out of order or things like that, that might make you want to delay purchase until the second printing. The Amazon review system is kind of annoying. There are three kinds of things I've seen people cover in reviews: content, presentation of content, and purchasing issues. For instance, I did a short review of a math book. The content was excellent. However, the conversion to ebook for the Kindle was unusable. Various mathematical symbols were not recognized during the OCR and were replaced with blank space. Amazon provides no way for me the rate the content at 5 stars and the presentation at 1 star for the Kindle edition. (And it provides no way to review just the Kindle edition. The reviews for all the editions are collected together).