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Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

322 points by Ovid 12y ago

chdir 12y ago
Upvoted for visibility. A bit related : another recent article on fake Amazon reviews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614 .
impostervt 12y ago
Web cache version, since the site is down for me: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.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... Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.
- sombremesa 12y ago
  Strangely both the cached version and the website only work for me if I hit Chrome's "stop loading" button while they load. Seems to be this JS file's fault: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/mt.js http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/mt.js
- dublinben 12y ago
  Do you leave your own review on those books to counteract the unearned rating?
  - impostervt 12y ago
    Usually yes, but always. I wish Amazon let you just give a star rating, instead of requiring you to add a real comment.
    - mcguire 12y ago
      I'd prefer it the other way around, actually. Forget the rating, maybe just give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down, and require at least a couple of sentences' worth of review. It's fairly easy to ignore a bogus review when you look at it, but the star system makes it too easy to take them at face value.
- tracker1 12y ago
  I've taken to looking at reviewer's "other" reviews when I see a slew of 1 or 5-star reviews for anything... It becomes pretty obvious which ones are real, or fake. I've come to trust those items with all 4-5 star reviews far less than I used to.
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matheweis 12y ago
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.
FreakyT 12y ago
Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. 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?
- mrbig4545 12y ago
  they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on
  - mod 12y ago
    Or perhaps remove non-verified reviews once there were more than just a couple of reviews. I've never published a dishonest review, but I have reviewed a product or two that I bought somewhere else (not on Amazon), but I certainly "bought the product."
  - awjr 12y ago
    This. This more than anything. Amazon is now in a position not to need reviews from people that currently own that book. Or better still, there is a point where there is a verified purchases threshold that triggers the hiding of unverified votes. Yes it still means a person can buy the book, then give it a bad review, then return it, however the effort to do this would be higher AND there would be a purchase pattern that begins to show itself.
    - vhost- 12y ago
      You can easily detect that. If a person buys a lot of books and make a lot of 5 star or 1 star reviews, then returns them, that's clearly abuse and you ban them.
      - jessaustin 12y ago
        Or just wait until they have a lot of books and then reject every return. Their purchase history would tell a compelling story for the credit card bank.
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joelrunyon 12y ago
I don't think this is unique to Amazon. 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). 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). I've had decent luck with having Apple remove any that are WAY off topic, but it still sucks. 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.
- mod 12y ago
  Of course in this case, he isn't getting bad reviews on his book. False good reviews on other books are pushing those "books" ahead of him. Any type of system to respond would be useless for this particular problem.
jplahn 12y ago
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. 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.
- theVirginian 12y ago
  I would say just include a code inside the box that you can type in to validate your review as an actual purchaser. Then Amazon could heavily weight these reviews, at least for products known to be prone to scam reviews.
  - obsurveyor 12y ago
    They already have a system for this: "Amazon Verified Purchase" will appear below the title of a review from someone who bought the book. Of course, they had to have purchased it from Amazon. They could default to only showing verified reviews by default or weighting verified reviews higher than unverified ones. It's too easy to create accounts and reviews to keep letting this just slide.
dougmccune 12y ago
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.
- thebiglebrewski 12y ago
  Wondering what your book was! I'm writing Linux for Hobbyists right now and wondering if it's a bit too niche.
  - dougmccune 12y ago
    It was Adobe Flex 3 for Dummies. Niche book on a tech topic that flamed out after a few years. If you've never written a book I'd still probably recommend doing it once. But don't expect to make any money, besides whatever advance you get. But it's still damn cool to be able to say you wrote a book.
    - thebiglebrewski 12y ago
      Wow, that one's super niche haha!! Sure, I'm self-publishing. Just glad to say I'm an author and hoping to make a little bit of cash too, we'll see.
      - seestheday 12y ago
        I always thought that technical book writing wasn't about making money directly, but for up selling in other areas. I.e. improving your resume, looking prestigious to potential consulting clients, or landing paid speaking gigs.
Zigurd 12y ago
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. 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. Reply to reviews, especially if a reader had difficulty with a code example and you can help them.
rcthompson 12y ago
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]."
- Ovid 12y ago
  That's an interesting thought. I'm pretty sure I could write up a nice grammar to chunk out "interesting" reviews of books. Instead of whining about my book getting buried by fake reviews, maybe I should chuck it and cache in on said reviews!
  - hurin 12y ago
    There should be very obvious ways to identify "review bots" - especially given that reviews are tied to an amazon accounts purchase and browsing history. That they don't have an efficient algorithm for this sounds more like they don't really care and never bothered with it.
    - tracker1 12y ago
      I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit of time and computing power to work through... Amazon has hundreds of thousands of products with tens of millions of reviews... correlating that with log history for each review will take a lot of time... not just to run, but to write any automated process, and work through resolving it. It seems to me that Amazon seems to be pretty responsive when bot reviews are pointed out, and that may be, or at least have been a more effective strategy... But looking at an article a few days ago regarding twitter bot nets, and even seeing them try to draw me in... it's a very large problem all around. Bad people will do bad things... as will misguided people. The bigger issue is the false positives... we've all read the horror stories of when a legitimate domain gets screwed by (insert popular domain registrar here) because of incorrect reportiong/reaction... or when a business' google apps is offline, and nobody can be reached at google... it happens. In the case mentioned in TFA... it's probably prudent to ban the publisher in question. In others, the case may well be different.
walterbell 12y ago
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. If this were a novel, economically hostile and unsubstantiated feedback would be considered economic warfare.
- noobermin 12y ago
  This is a romantic idea, but the obvious problem is that bad computer generated reviews are cheap and easy to produce, so there are naturally too many of them for the author to reply to individually.
floatingatoll 12y ago
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. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us #1: Ignore this section, skip to #2. #2: From the dropdowns, select: "More order issues", "Give Amazon feedback", "Other feedback topic". In the text box, enter "Catalog feedback". #3: Click "Chat". 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. Including a direct link to the Perl category helps them tremendously: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011 http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011 And I also included a link to the post above. 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.
- deleted 12y ago
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MayanAstronaut 12y ago
Much like search engines combat black hat SEO, amazon and reviews systems can do the same. 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...) 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.
- echoless 12y ago
  It's always a cat and mouse game however. Once they employ machine learning, I'm assuming the spammers will adapt and create reviews that fool the algorithm(though at an increased initial cost).
- tracker1 12y ago
  In this case, the positive fake reviews are for verified purchases of ebooks that are relatively cheap... I'd suggest reviews from accounts more than 2 years old, with over 5 reviews, and more than $500 spent would probably be a better baseline for training.
- notatoad 12y ago
  Trusting "verified purchase" reviews is a pretty easy way to allow a lot of fake reviews. On a 99c ebook your royalty is 35%, that means a verified fake review only costs you 65c.
Procrastes 12y ago
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.
FilterJoe 12y ago
I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week. Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test: Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word? 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. 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: http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833 http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833 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. 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: http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8 http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8 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.
- bduerst 12y ago
  Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move. Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy. If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn't be there as a constant reminder.
  - benologist 12y ago
    They do this - Was this comment helpful? Click no and you can report it along with a brief message. It's either ineffective or doesn't do anything at all, can't tell.
doktrin 12y ago
I'm also surprised that Amazon has such a poor handle on their product reviews. Obviously fake reviews absolutely litter the site. Speaking as only a consumer, it makes the process of purchasing much more cumbersome than it ought to be. 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 blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics.
- deleted 12y ago
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- Ovid 12y ago
  > Many fake reviews are blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics. Yes, that's true, but I think this is a question of scale. Amazon is the world's largest e-commerce site (well, I think they're #2 after Alibaba now) and I've worked on some of the world's largest sites. Even "trivial" solutions become much harder at that scale.
codecondo 12y ago
"...I was intrigue and more interested in playing minecraft knowing different tips and tricks that can help me to win the game. " Lol. chuckle
JustSomeNobody 12y ago
Off topic a bit, but is there a review/rating system that isn't gamable (sp?) like this?
codezero 12y ago
There's no point in playing whack-a-mole with the hired reviewers, they should be punishing the book publishers who are paying for this.
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eel 12y ago
Sometimes review abuse is more subtle than the example in the article given. 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. 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. 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. All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5 star book instead of 5/5.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  This is curious, because my g/f (who read the book and liked it) posted a good review of a novel I wrote and her review was removed because Amazon figured out she knew me. I have no idea how they did this: we don't live together and I'm not sure I've ever bought her anything off Amazon, certainly not at her present address. So I have the impression that Amazon is pretty good at weeding out good reviews from people you know, while still being complete rubbish at policing obvious spam reviews, and doing a terrible job of suppressing reviews from obvious trolls (my book has a two-star review from a guy who also gave "A Tale of Two Cities" a two star review, but you wouldn't know that unless you looked at their review history, and who can be bothered to do that? As both an author and book-buyer, Amazon's review system is a complete loss. Every single book I look at has both good and bad reviews with almost no way to tell if they are based on standards at all relevant to my taste. Any review that doesn't say something along the lines of "My taste runs to X and this was a great example of X" or "My taste runs to Y and while this was kinda-Y-like it failed in these respects" may as well not exist.
egonschiele 12y ago
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
- TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
  You make significantly more than 5% of the cover price if you self-publish. There isn't much reason to use a publisher, unless its a reputable one who fronts you an advance and knows how to market your book for increased sales.
  - egonschiele 12y ago
    Again, it depends on why you are writing the book. I have heard that you make $10k on avg if you use a publisher, vs $50k avg if you self-publish. If you are doing it for the money, self-publishing might be the way to go. I'm using a publisher because: - They have the resources to market the book. The book's not done yet and I've already sold ~2000 advance copies. I'm trying to reach as many people with this book as possible, and it would have taken me a lot longer to sell 2k copies on my own. - I'm trying to learn how to write a tech book. My editor is the rare breed that cares about making a good book, and has 20 years of teaching + writing experience. I have learned a lot from him.
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dukefall 12y ago
You can use my site (posted on hacker news back in January): www.fakespot.com It basically analyzes reviews to detect if they are fake or not.
cwyers 12y ago
> Come on, Amazon, you can do a better job! 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.
Osiris 12y ago
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.
bootload 12y ago
"why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?>" 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?
downandout 12y ago
Steps to reproduce: 1) Visit Fiverr [1] 2) Repeat 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. [1] 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 https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&qu...
harmonicon 12y ago
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. 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. They are out there.
castelle 12y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
- Ovid 12y ago
  The books aren't about Perl; they're gaming the Amazon system. That being said, it was interesting when you commented about sales rank. Yeah, they sell more than I do, but you can frequently buy the for $0.99, when my sells for a real price. That might make them break even, but since they're (I'm assuming) self-published, they're probably making far more money overall.
GoodIntentions 12y ago
If amazon made it policy to remove any negative comments that steer readers to competing products I think, on the balance it would help.
Ovid 12y ago
OP here. 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 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_c...) — 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.
argo11 12y ago
It's happening on MANY products and ruining Amazon credibility.It has become open and notorious!!!
tsotha 12y ago
>why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP? 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.

322 points by Ovid 12y ago

chdir 12y ago

Upvoted for visibility. A bit related : another recent article on fake Amazon reviews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614 .

impostervt 12y ago

Web cache version, since the site is down for me: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.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... Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.

sombremesa 12y ago
Strangely both the cached version and the website only work for me if I hit Chrome's "stop loading" button while they load. Seems to be this JS file's fault: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/mt.js http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/mt.js
dublinben 12y ago
Do you leave your own review on those books to counteract the unearned rating?
- impostervt 12y ago
  Usually yes, but always. I wish Amazon let you just give a star rating, instead of requiring you to add a real comment.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    I'd prefer it the other way around, actually. Forget the rating, maybe just give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down, and require at least a couple of sentences' worth of review. It's fairly easy to ignore a bogus review when you look at it, but the star system makes it too easy to take them at face value.
tracker1 12y ago
I've taken to looking at reviewer's "other" reviews when I see a slew of 1 or 5-star reviews for anything... It becomes pretty obvious which ones are real, or fake. I've come to trust those items with all 4-5 star reviews far less than I used to.

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matheweis 12y ago

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.

FreakyT 12y ago

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. 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?

mrbig4545 12y ago
they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on
- mod 12y ago
  Or perhaps remove non-verified reviews once there were more than just a couple of reviews. I've never published a dishonest review, but I have reviewed a product or two that I bought somewhere else (not on Amazon), but I certainly "bought the product."
- awjr 12y ago
  This. This more than anything. Amazon is now in a position not to need reviews from people that currently own that book. Or better still, there is a point where there is a verified purchases threshold that triggers the hiding of unverified votes. Yes it still means a person can buy the book, then give it a bad review, then return it, however the effort to do this would be higher AND there would be a purchase pattern that begins to show itself.
  - vhost- 12y ago
    You can easily detect that. If a person buys a lot of books and make a lot of 5 star or 1 star reviews, then returns them, that's clearly abuse and you ban them.
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      Or just wait until they have a lot of books and then reject every return. Their purchase history would tell a compelling story for the credit card bank.

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joelrunyon 12y ago

I don't think this is unique to Amazon. 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). 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). I've had decent luck with having Apple remove any that are WAY off topic, but it still sucks. 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.

mod 12y ago
Of course in this case, he isn't getting bad reviews on his book. False good reviews on other books are pushing those "books" ahead of him. Any type of system to respond would be useless for this particular problem.

jplahn 12y ago

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. 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.

theVirginian 12y ago
I would say just include a code inside the box that you can type in to validate your review as an actual purchaser. Then Amazon could heavily weight these reviews, at least for products known to be prone to scam reviews.
- obsurveyor 12y ago
  They already have a system for this: "Amazon Verified Purchase" will appear below the title of a review from someone who bought the book. Of course, they had to have purchased it from Amazon. They could default to only showing verified reviews by default or weighting verified reviews higher than unverified ones. It's too easy to create accounts and reviews to keep letting this just slide.

dougmccune 12y ago

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.

thebiglebrewski 12y ago
Wondering what your book was! I'm writing Linux for Hobbyists right now and wondering if it's a bit too niche.
- dougmccune 12y ago
  It was Adobe Flex 3 for Dummies. Niche book on a tech topic that flamed out after a few years. If you've never written a book I'd still probably recommend doing it once. But don't expect to make any money, besides whatever advance you get. But it's still damn cool to be able to say you wrote a book.
  - thebiglebrewski 12y ago
    Wow, that one's super niche haha!! Sure, I'm self-publishing. Just glad to say I'm an author and hoping to make a little bit of cash too, we'll see.
    - seestheday 12y ago
      I always thought that technical book writing wasn't about making money directly, but for up selling in other areas. I.e. improving your resume, looking prestigious to potential consulting clients, or landing paid speaking gigs.

Zigurd 12y ago

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. 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. Reply to reviews, especially if a reader had difficulty with a code example and you can help them.

rcthompson 12y ago

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]."

Ovid 12y ago
That's an interesting thought. I'm pretty sure I could write up a nice grammar to chunk out "interesting" reviews of books. Instead of whining about my book getting buried by fake reviews, maybe I should chuck it and cache in on said reviews!
- hurin 12y ago
  There should be very obvious ways to identify "review bots" - especially given that reviews are tied to an amazon accounts purchase and browsing history. That they don't have an efficient algorithm for this sounds more like they don't really care and never bothered with it.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit of time and computing power to work through... Amazon has hundreds of thousands of products with tens of millions of reviews... correlating that with log history for each review will take a lot of time... not just to run, but to write any automated process, and work through resolving it. It seems to me that Amazon seems to be pretty responsive when bot reviews are pointed out, and that may be, or at least have been a more effective strategy... But looking at an article a few days ago regarding twitter bot nets, and even seeing them try to draw me in... it's a very large problem all around. Bad people will do bad things... as will misguided people. The bigger issue is the false positives... we've all read the horror stories of when a legitimate domain gets screwed by (insert popular domain registrar here) because of incorrect reportiong/reaction... or when a business' google apps is offline, and nobody can be reached at google... it happens. In the case mentioned in TFA... it's probably prudent to ban the publisher in question. In others, the case may well be different.

walterbell 12y ago

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. If this were a novel, economically hostile and unsubstantiated feedback would be considered economic warfare.

noobermin 12y ago
This is a romantic idea, but the obvious problem is that bad computer generated reviews are cheap and easy to produce, so there are naturally too many of them for the author to reply to individually.

floatingatoll 12y ago

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. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us #1: Ignore this section, skip to #2. #2: From the dropdowns, select: "More order issues", "Give Amazon feedback", "Other feedback topic". In the text box, enter "Catalog feedback". #3: Click "Chat". 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. Including a direct link to the Perl category helps them tremendously: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011 http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011 And I also included a link to the post above. 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.

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MayanAstronaut 12y ago

Much like search engines combat black hat SEO, amazon and reviews systems can do the same. 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...) 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.

echoless 12y ago
It's always a cat and mouse game however. Once they employ machine learning, I'm assuming the spammers will adapt and create reviews that fool the algorithm(though at an increased initial cost).
tracker1 12y ago
In this case, the positive fake reviews are for verified purchases of ebooks that are relatively cheap... I'd suggest reviews from accounts more than 2 years old, with over 5 reviews, and more than $500 spent would probably be a better baseline for training.
notatoad 12y ago
Trusting "verified purchase" reviews is a pretty easy way to allow a lot of fake reviews. On a 99c ebook your royalty is 35%, that means a verified fake review only costs you 65c.

Procrastes 12y ago

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.

FilterJoe 12y ago

I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week. Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test: Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word? 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. 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: http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833 http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833 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. 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: http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8 http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8 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.

bduerst 12y ago
Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move. Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy. If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn't be there as a constant reminder.
- benologist 12y ago
  They do this - Was this comment helpful? Click no and you can report it along with a brief message. It's either ineffective or doesn't do anything at all, can't tell.

doktrin 12y ago

I'm also surprised that Amazon has such a poor handle on their product reviews. Obviously fake reviews absolutely litter the site. Speaking as only a consumer, it makes the process of purchasing much more cumbersome than it ought to be. 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 blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics.

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Ovid 12y ago
> Many fake reviews are blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics. Yes, that's true, but I think this is a question of scale. Amazon is the world's largest e-commerce site (well, I think they're #2 after Alibaba now) and I've worked on some of the world's largest sites. Even "trivial" solutions become much harder at that scale.

codecondo 12y ago

"...I was intrigue and more interested in playing minecraft knowing different tips and tricks that can help me to win the game. " Lol. chuckle

JustSomeNobody 12y ago

Off topic a bit, but is there a review/rating system that isn't gamable (sp?) like this?

codezero 12y ago

There's no point in playing whack-a-mole with the hired reviewers, they should be punishing the book publishers who are paying for this.

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eel 12y ago

Sometimes review abuse is more subtle than the example in the article given. 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. 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. 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. All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5 star book instead of 5/5.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
This is curious, because my g/f (who read the book and liked it) posted a good review of a novel I wrote and her review was removed because Amazon figured out she knew me. I have no idea how they did this: we don't live together and I'm not sure I've ever bought her anything off Amazon, certainly not at her present address. So I have the impression that Amazon is pretty good at weeding out good reviews from people you know, while still being complete rubbish at policing obvious spam reviews, and doing a terrible job of suppressing reviews from obvious trolls (my book has a two-star review from a guy who also gave "A Tale of Two Cities" a two star review, but you wouldn't know that unless you looked at their review history, and who can be bothered to do that? As both an author and book-buyer, Amazon's review system is a complete loss. Every single book I look at has both good and bad reviews with almost no way to tell if they are based on standards at all relevant to my taste. Any review that doesn't say something along the lines of "My taste runs to X and this was a great example of X" or "My taste runs to Y and while this was kinda-Y-like it failed in these respects" may as well not exist.

egonschiele 12y ago

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
You make significantly more than 5% of the cover price if you self-publish. There isn't much reason to use a publisher, unless its a reputable one who fronts you an advance and knows how to market your book for increased sales.
- egonschiele 12y ago
  Again, it depends on why you are writing the book. I have heard that you make $10k on avg if you use a publisher, vs $50k avg if you self-publish. If you are doing it for the money, self-publishing might be the way to go. I'm using a publisher because: - They have the resources to market the book. The book's not done yet and I've already sold ~2000 advance copies. I'm trying to reach as many people with this book as possible, and it would have taken me a lot longer to sell 2k copies on my own. - I'm trying to learn how to write a tech book. My editor is the rare breed that cares about making a good book, and has 20 years of teaching + writing experience. I have learned a lot from him.

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dukefall 12y ago

You can use my site (posted on hacker news back in January): www.fakespot.com It basically analyzes reviews to detect if they are fake or not.

cwyers 12y ago

> Come on, Amazon, you can do a better job! 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.

Osiris 12y ago

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.

bootload 12y ago

"why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?>" 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?

downandout 12y ago

Steps to reproduce: 1) Visit Fiverr [1] 2) Repeat 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. [1] 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 https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&qu...

harmonicon 12y ago

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. 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. They are out there.

castelle 12y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

Ovid 12y ago
The books aren't about Perl; they're gaming the Amazon system. That being said, it was interesting when you commented about sales rank. Yeah, they sell more than I do, but you can frequently buy the for $0.99, when my sells for a real price. That might make them break even, but since they're (I'm assuming) self-published, they're probably making far more money overall.

GoodIntentions 12y ago

If amazon made it policy to remove any negative comments that steer readers to competing products I think, on the balance it would help.

Ovid 12y ago

OP here. 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 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_c...) — 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.

argo11 12y ago

It's happening on MANY products and ruining Amazon credibility.It has become open and notorious!!!

tsotha 12y ago

>why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP? 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.