A long-held suspicion has been confirmed: not only have the customer reviews at Amazon.com become a battleground for non-literary ideologies, they are also being rigged for both sales and ego. Caveat emptor!
Close observers of Amazon.com noticed something peculiar this week: The company's Canadian site had suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews on the U.S. site under signatures like "a reader from New York."Posted by Alan at February 14, 2004 01:37 PMThe weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book -- when they think no one is watching.
But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.