A top reviewer supporting bootleg products?

See for yourself, http://www.amazon.com/review/R2E50YDIF1P4IM/ref=cm_aya_cmt/102-4421097-9253744?%5Fencoding=UTF8&ASIN=B000RIY9A2#wasThisHelpful

Even more curious is why does Amazon allow bootleg items to be sold on their site?

Amazon Break Through Novel Award

I thought I'd update you on how this is going for me. I received an invite to be one of the reviewers (as posted earlier), and I said I could do two a week. I have a link I go to and log in and there will sit my items to download and review. They are usually about 10 pages, in MS Word. So far there have been a couple of promising ones, and two real turkeys. The rest are (at least for me) just mediocre. I usually don't read contemporary fiction, and thrillers and scifi are not even in the picture for me, but I put a note on my review that I don't read those genres to be fair to the author.

It's really hard to judge where a story is going if you don't know if it's SF, Romance, a thriller, etc. The first time they sent my a spreadsheet that gave a brief description of the book and that helped me immensely, but I haven't received any updates.

From what I recall from the website, after these preliminaries are through there will be selections made for the final review process and then winner(s) chosen. So far it's been an interesting experience and I'm glad I was able to participate.

New Amazon Video Reviews

1. Has anyone seen one yet? If so, can you point me in that direction?
2. WOW! I got an email from Amazon offering a FREE flip video camcorder (I'm sure I'm not the only one who got that email), I don't even have to pay freight! It looks like they want to encourage more reviews.

Not sure if I want to put myself on camera to the world yet, can't quite imagine a book review on video. I think krossd could do much better than I could :-)

Where Have All The Comments Gone?

Amazon has an unintentionally amusing new policy for safeguarding its sales or certain of its top reviewers' feelings. It now "hides" many of the comments below reviews if they haven't received lemming-like endorsements from such cabals as the Notorious Grady Harp Voting Machine. In Amazon's words, "Customers don't think this post adds to the discussion." Usually, this awkward censorship in the Comments section is immediately undermined by the following concession," Show post anyway." Amazon here reminds me of the editors of my high school Latin textbooks. They routinely censored Ovid and Plautus, but feeling guilty, included the excised "dirty" sections in the backs of the books. Enterprising students, of course, turned to those "hidden" passages first. It might be wise now to follow the same practice when reading Amazon's Comments sections. For examples of the seller's new practice, see the instances at the foot of several of Grady Harp's newest reviews.

Is it possible to read 7 books in a day…every day?

A good question.

Is Harriet Klausner for real?

Is it possible to read 7 books in a day…every day?

That’s apparently what Harriet Klausner is doing. The famed #1 book reviewer on Amazon.com (who does claim to be a speed-reader) posts, on average, 7 book reviews a day. So not only does Harriet have time for reading all these books, she can also whip off reviews of them pretty quickly, too.

Color me skeptical, and I’m not the only one. Read this page of comments to see how curious observers are challenging Harriet’s numbers, while others are coming to her aid. [...]

For the whole thing visit here.

Taylor X is back commenting

Well, he seems to be commenting on review comments again and he's removed the comment about his comments being closed from his profile page, http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3MOF5KF93Q6WE/102-4421097-9253744?sort_by=MostRecentComment&display=public&x=10&y=18

BENJAMINS 'R US

Unless I've been unable to access the option, it appears that Amazon has deleted the opportunity once accorded to users to comment on new movies still in theaters under the category "Theatrical Releases." I wanted to comment on the grossly overpraised indie film "Lars and the Real Girl," a finely acted but dully developed and finally stupid two hour ordeal, ideally suited to the Lifetime or Oxygen Channel. Amazon, most likely because it can't sell anything but the soundtrack for brand new films, seems to have dropped the category of "Theatrical Releases" for its reviewers. Ars Gratia Pecuniae!