My first non-Germany, non-landlord post, prompted by this item in the New York Times: Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers.
It seems that there was a glitch in Amazon's Canadian site that revealed the true identity of anyone who'd posted an anonymous review ("Reviewer: A Reader from New York, NY ...") For a week, the curtain was pulled back to reveal cliques of jealous writers savaging other (usually more successful) writers, famous writers (including literary superstar Dave Eggers) defending their friends, and writers giving their own books glowing five-star reviews.
However, the second page touched on what I consider to be one of the real mysteries of Amazon: Harriet Klausner. Harriet is Amazon's #1 reviewer, having written almost 6,500 reviews. On most days, she'll review multiple books. None of her reviews rises past the level of a second-grade book report: she usually provides a one- or two-paragraph synopsis of the plot, following up with an "if you love (x), than you'll love this!"-style conclusion. It seems that she's never read a book that she didn't like, not even a little bit: virtually all of the books she reads get a full five stars.
Who is this person? Why spend so much time and effort posting "reviews" that offer no more content or insight than what's usually printed on the back cover of the book? How can you claim to read more than one book a day and take away anything meaningful from those books? In the article, she's grousing about how other reviewers are conspiring against her, organizing people to vote her reviews "not helpful" in order to take away her coveted number-one spot.
Um, Harriet, maybe it's just that you're genuinely not helpful ...
I'm not the first person to wonder what's behind the Harriet Klausner machine; the best guesses I can find on the Internet is that Harriet genuinely likes books, and her "#1" mantle is enough to score her review copies from clueless publishers. (Or advance copies from people looking for softball reviews -- thanks to Amazon's new full-text-search feature, you can see that there are a distressingly large number of books that aren't afraid to incorporate a blurb from Harriet in their front matter.)
Posted by Kevin at February 15, 2004 09:49 PM