Are there victims of Amazon's killer reviews?

Last week, a literary "whodunit" circling around extraordinarily nasty reviews on Amazon's British website came to a surprise conclusion. The anonymous reviews fit a pattern: The targets were some of the nation's leading academics, and all the reviews were all written by the screen name "Historian," the Guardian reports.

The spat began last week when the Cambridge-based academic, Dr Rachel Polonsky, noticed among the many favourable reviews of her book on Russian culture, Molotov's Magic Lantern, one condemning her efforts as "dense", "pretentious" and "the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published".

It ended late on Friday evening with the surprise unveiling of [Prof. Orlando] Figes's wife, Dr Stephanie Palmer, a senior law lecturer at Cambridge University, barrister, and member of the top human rights specialists, Blackstone Chambers, as the reviewer calling herself "Historian", and responsible for several anonymous online attacks on the works of her husband's rivals.

A review of Figes' book by "Historian" had been favorable, so attention initially turned to him, but he denied involvement. Later things became so heated that the announcement his wife was the anonymous reviewer  was delivered through a lawyer.

Although the strongly worded reviews took British academics aback, there are plenty of good books that are pilloried by Amazon reviewers. Salon collected several savage reviews of acknowledged masterpieces, including Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl," George Orwell's "1984," "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser, "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. They all went something like this:

Looking for a sappy, cliched, novel to read? One predictable as most young-adult books and more degrading than harlequin romances? Well, To Kill a Mockingbird is your book.

No matter how strongly they feel, a few naysayers are not going to sink the reputations of Anne Frank or George Orwell. And these reviews do have a context: Other readers can vote them "helpful" or not; the most helpful float to the top. And if you click through to see all reviews, the most helpful favorable and most helpful critical reviews are prominently displayed. Amazon's review scheme isn't just a bunch of voices trying to shout the loudest; it has built in the wisdom of crowds.

But not all books can expect to gather a crowd of reviews. Though "The Grapes of Wrath" has 655 reviews, economist Jeffrey Sachs' "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet" has just 34. If only a few people have read a book, or if it has a specialized audience, such as those books that got trashed by Stephanie Palmer, can negative reviews affect sales?

Amazon isn't exactly a neutral reviewing ground. I've heard of newly published authors urging friends to leave nice reviews on the site to give their books a little momentum. Some of the reviews on Amazon seem more like notes left in a friend's yearbook than anything else. And I'd like to think that most readers see that  too.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Scott Eells / Bloomberg News

Comments

[Peggy Owens]

That's a great whodunit! I always read the reviews, but I seldom let them influence my decision to buy. Reviews used to be a genre all their own, but I guess there are just not that many H L. Menckens or Oscar Wildes around any more....

[Michael Lee]

It is kind of like the Olympics, toss out the worst, toss out the best, and see what remains.

[ToddCW]

Not to be glib but the all online reviews should be somewhat suspect. This includes standard retail products, hotels, dining etc. I would certainly ask all my friends to write glowing reviews of my widgets be they books or otherwise.

[Greenslip]

And this doesn't even touch on the whole issue of paid reviews. More and more publishers are actually paying for reviews and of course only posting excellent ones.

[Adam]

Amazon should add two elements to its helpful unhelpful evaluations: Troll and Plant.

A troll button could be pressed if readers think--like the reviewer Historian in this article--are meant to be mean and degrading, not honestly critical in a helpful way. This would also help mitigate against students who are offended at having to read a book for class--they're going to dislike any book you give them, especially if its an older classic--which are going to trend towards the trollish and immature reviews most of us would expect.

A Plant button could be pressed if readers think that the review is a stooge review by either the author, publisher, or friend of same; meaning it is not a helpful critical rave but a 'bought and paid for' positive review, so to speak. This would be akin to Historian's positive review of her husband's work.

A few changes like that would give a lot of nuance to amazon's helpful/unhelpful system of reviews.