Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Amazon 'fixes' the review problem (the John T. Reed case)

Here's an interesting story from John T. Reed, one of the few respectable writers on real-estate investment (as well as some other themes). This story concerns his experience with the Amazon reviews system. I offer this excerpt w/o commentary: the story speaks for itself.
Review
Amazon once received a very favorable review of my book Coaching Youth Football. In fact, that book is so successful that two other books that used to have different titles changed their titles to Coaching Youth Football. [...]

The fact that the other publishers copied my title to profit from my writing is not Amazon’s fault. But [the following] is. I asked Amazon to stop selling my books, which they sort of did. But they put the very favorable review of my book on the page where they were selling one of the other Coaching Youth Football books. How do I know the review was about my book? Because the reviewer used my name as the author in the review!

I called to complain. [...] Finally they 'fixed' the problem. But how they 'fixed' it tells you volumes about the IQ and integrity of the people who work for Amazon. They left the review of my book on the other book’s Web page, but they removed my name from the review!!

1 comment:

Barbara Delaney said...

There is nothing Amazon could do that would surprise me at this point. Their dismissal of this author's concern and then the use of a review written for his book put on another...clearly they're ethically challenged to say the least.