Friday, October 24, 2008

Amazon.com Reviewer Shake-Up: Down with Harriet Klausner

Amazon.com has just changed the way it ranks reviewers (see the announcement over at the Customer Reviews Discusson Board). This is big news to many who view Amazon reviewing as a competitive sport.

Of particular interest is the fact that the change eliminates Harriet Klausner's stranglehold on the number one reviewer spot. For as long as people have been paying attention to such things, Klausner ('Harriet K' at Amazon) has been famous as the top-ranked Amazon reviewer. She averages 7 reviews a day, and many people believe Klausner games the system in order to hold on to the number one spot with always-generous reviews and reviews that are no more than plot summaries. Under Amazon's new system, Klausner is now ranked 442. It will be interesting to see whether she's able to reclaim the top spot under the new system.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've seen people who have reviews for thousands of books on amazon. There's just no way they could have read all of them, so their reviews don't hold much weight with me.

Katherine said...

This is actually pretty amazing. I went over to Amazon to check things out, and I was shocked to find that my new raking is 200 paces higher than my classic one when you get to the top 1000, that number is huge)!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this Gwen/ This is always a hot topic over at the LT ARC Junkies message boards!

Sandra said...

How does anyone get away with reviewing any book they haven't read? No one can read seven books in a day. I'm probably in the minority on this but I don't even want to hear anyone's opinion on a book they haven't read, and I mean cover to cover. If you didn't like it, tell me which page you quit on
and what you didn't like. After that your opinion means little or nothing to me. You're just using the publisher's synopsis and things others have said. I can read those for myself. Frankly, I'd trust book bloggers or LibraryThing reviewers before I'd trust online bookseller reviewers.

Sam Sattler said...

I've been wondering for the last couple of years what it would take to knock Harriet out of that number one slot, so I'm tickled to see it finally happen. Personally, I always wondered it "Harriet" was a team of six or ten people because no one could read that many books...or want to, for that matter.

Her reviews have always been pretty poor, by any literary standard, so this is good news to a whole lot of people.

The new Amazon ranking system is interesting, to say the least. And, even with the problems it still seems to have, it is a definite improvement over the old one.

Good riddance to Harriet.

Anonymous said...

The Amazon top reviewers thing is just full of crap. I bet some of these people don't even read half of the books they review.

I took away my business with Amazon altogether after I stopped submitting reviews to them.

 
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