Amazon Reviewers

On Friday night, my wife and I went to the "Friends of the Library" library book sale, here in Los Altos. This morning, I went to the Amazon web site, to see how the books that I'd bought rated (how many stars they had). This gives me a rought indication of what I'm likely to enjoy, and which ones I might just gives away to another library sale rather than spend the time trying to read. As I've mentioned before, this is not your usual book buying experience and there are "so many books, so little time".

After reading one truly bogus review for a book that typically rated 4 or 5 stars, and that I knew myself was excellent, I started getting interested in just who these reviewers were. If you click on a reviewer's "See all my reviews" link, you'll get to a page that gives their reviewer rank. Click on that, you'll then get to a list (in numerical order) of all the reviewers. A few clicks on the "Page:" link near the top, got me to the beginning of the list. On page 1, at the top of the list, we find the top ten reviewers. At poll position is Harriet Klausner who has 8455 reviews. Now, let's think about this for a moment. Ms. Klausner mentions that she was an "acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania" that went onto doing freelance reviews. Now how long has Amazon been going? Less that ten years. Let's round it up to 10 for easy arithmetic. So that means that on average, she is doing 16-17 reviews a week! Now I suppose she could have had a load stored up before Amazon existed and typed them all in since then. But still. 16 reviews a week, most of them books! Even if you are a good speed reader, what kind of quality review can you give if you are knocking them out at this rate? I read her review of Lururu, a recent Jack Vance novel, where she wrote "LURULU entertains the audience as if Seinfeld and crew were in space". In other words, she just didn't get it at all.

But it gets better (or worst, depending on how you look at it). The number 2 reviewer is Lawrence M. Bernabo, who has a staggering 9358 reviews (that 17-18 reviews a week, to save you doing the math). And some of his reviews are long! Where do these people find the time? Do they sub-contract?

A small piece of advice. If a book at Amazon has had a lot of reviewers, concentrate on the Spotlight reviews. These are typically the ones that other people have found the most useful.

From all of this, I was left with a wish to know a couple other things. If anybody knows how to get to this information, I'd be very grateful.

• How do you get to a list of the best-selling books on Amazon? That rating is given for each book, so I'd like to think it's possible. I'm sure that books like the Harry Potter series, will be near the top, but I'm curious to see what else is there.
• What books have had the most comments? Again, I'll bet that the Harry Potter books are near the top of that list, but it sure would be an interesting list to read.

Maybe the Amazon Hacks book would tell me how to do this, but from looking at the table of contents, I'm not convinced it will.

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( Jan 30 2005, 06:55:44 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [5]