Klausner posts same review twice, under different names

First time I see that. Here Harriet posted two absolutely identical reviews, first time as Harriet Klausner and then as "A Romance Reader". Both times five stars (no surprises here). It's a great way to increase a book's average rating, of course... How many more sock-puppet accounts does she have, I wonder?

Anyway, here's a shapshot (just in case the original page gets changed; click to see normal size; I did shrink it a bit to fit on screen, but it's readable though):

Harriet busts through 300 reviews a month limit

Thanks to poster Guy the Gorilla we now have another update of Klausner stats for the last half a year.

Guy the Gorilla says:
Congratulations Harriet - I never thought I'd live to see it, but you came through with a last day mini-surge and upped your already prolific tally for the month to an amazing 301 "reviews" of books you could not possibly have read for the month of April. It has been a banner month - you must have truly had a case of Spring Fever - I can think of no other explanation for this vintage performance - other than the kickback payola checks from the publishers of the mass market paperbacks you favor.

To put this month's efforts in perspective, let's review Harriet's more recent output:

228 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in September 2010
296 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in October 2010
187 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in November 2010
192 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in December 2010
185 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in January 2011
229 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in February 2011
204 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in March 2011
301 "reviews" of books she could not possibly have read in April 2011

I'm glad you finally broke through the 300 barrier at this time. Because Harriet, I must congratulate you for something else. I officially surrender. I cannot keep up with you. I cannot think of any new jokes or comments to amuse myself or my sister Gwynneth the Gorilla, who still lurks on these pages as well, that hasn't been repeated in one variation or another at least a hundred times by now. I am bored with you. You're just not funny to me anymore. I am tired of you and your garbled English and your sub-genres and your silly Defense Squad. Someone else will have to pick up the standard and carry on the good fight in the trenches for a while - I am spent. Perhaps I will check in from time to time - especially to monitor your progress towards the fabled 25,000 career "reviews" of books you have not read (you are up to 24, 420 and closing fast) - but for now, Harriet, I bid you a fond adieu...

So, our dear Harriet would want us to believe that this April she was reading (AND reviewing) slighly over ten (10) books a day on average. That's double (nearly) her Amazon life-time average of about six (6) a day (under her current account, beginning in the late November 1999).

Urbi et Orbi (of sorts: how to send us an email)

This message is for the readers of this blog who are not memebers who write to us (we welcome such correspondence, of course). We get a good amount of email, and finally I want to address some recurring issues: basically, a few suggestions for our potential correspondents. Sorry for the fake-friendly, corporate style, but: in order to make our interaction more rewarding, please:

1. State clearly what you want and, provided your note is more than a comment on some of our entries, introduce yourself.

2. If you want to add a comment (which is entirely good and welcome), state what part of your email constitutes this comment, as well as whether you'd like your name to be mentioned. By default we will redact all personal specifics (for the sake of privacy). Of course, we may or may not post your comment (depending on how good it is), and we may edit any such correspondence before posting. In general such editing is for grammar/coherence (assuming it's worth bothering to begin with).

3. If you want to join, give at least a brief explanation as to the reasons you wish to do so.

But mostly, just write a clear and understandable note. A lot of people don't bother. Here's an example: "Hey your so right and Joe Blow does even worse I still want a reffund from them!!!!!". Well, great, except we've got no clue who Joe Blow is and what the thrilling story of your refund is. This sort of thing. Finally, if you sent us an email, give us a few days to get it. Sometimes we're busy with other things in our lives and it may take us a few days to get to your note. So don't send us a dozen "are you alive?" messages every day. Give it a few days or a week before following up. We are alive and we are quite likely to react to reasonable inquiries from reasonable people, be it a comment to add or a request to join.

April Fool's Day: Harriet Klausner read sixty-eight (68) books today...

That is, she posted sixty-eight (68) "reviews" today, but surely Harriet wouldn't post a review of a book she didn't read, would she? As far as I could see, all of them five and four stars. When you work intensively like that, errors are inavoidable: Harriet confused a couple of books posting wrong blurbs under wrong books. And the funniest thing of all, someone found one such review "helpful"! "Team Harrier" clicks "yes" on Klausner reviews without reading them just like Harriet "reviews" books without reading. Here's her review of The Goodbye Quilt:



And here are a couple of puzzled commenters voicing their concerns:



Slow down, Harriet! After all, you read only two books a day, remember? Not sixty-eight.

This is what I'd like to see happen re: Amazon review system...

What would be nice is to see someone decide to file a lawsuit against Amazon with the FTC regarding their review system. If we as reviewers technically have to reveal any association with the product that might influence our review, then a case could be made that either 1) HK might be in violation of that rule, and/or 2) Amazon is fraudulently manipulating sales via their review system, referring back to the same FTC regulations.

In a perfect world, it would open up some of the inner workings of Amazon's system and why some reviewers are protected like HK, when her reviewing exploits are obviously on par with Santa Claus being able to visit every house in the world over a 24 hour period... :)

And for those of you reading... this is my first post to the board (thanks for the invite, Malleus). I don't know that I'll be all that active, as I tend to avoid "pissing matches" over how much someone can review. Yes, I'm an Amazon reviewer, and just recently dropped out of the top 100. And yes, I *do* read a lot and review all that I read, as I enjoy writing. But my numbers have dropped of late, as I finished writing a book last year with a co-author, and I'm working on another one right now...

Simon suffers a wipeout (Klausner Protection Squad™ strikes again)

Another day, another news. Well, a new victim rather, but nothing really new: Amazon wipes out yet another commenter who dared to talk about the fraud that Harriet Klausner is. Everyone knows Simon Davis (he's been around for quite some time). He's been intermittently active in the Klausner "trenches", and we all know that this means asking for trouble. Today is the day: he just got wiped out by Amazon. I learned about this shameful news from a comment by another poster (I'm adding both a link and a snapshot — just in case the original gets deleted and the link becomes useless):


And indeed, it appears that Amazon wiped out every single comment Simon has ever posted: here are just a few examples — here;



and here:



and more:



Amazon is exceptionally unsubtle about muzzling everyone who dares to bring up the dangerous topic of their love of shills on their site: can't touch this! Shameful and revolting, especially since it's done so in-your-face for those who know what goes on, yet to a casual visitor it looks like perhaps the comment was offensive and was removed legitimately. After all, there's no button "let's look at what this was before Amazon deleted it" one could click on and see whether the deletion was justifiable. Many times, in process of wising up to what Klausner and her likes actually do on Amazon, people say something like, "I wonder why this or that guy got deleted-by-Amazon. First I thought perhaps his posts were inappropriate, but now I wonder..." Indeed.

Now, I'm sure Amazon doesn't give a crap about comments: I've seen really bad, rude comments (and reported them too), and nothing ever happened to them: so it's not like Amazon watches what goes on on their site all the time — nor do they pay any attention to isolated "report-this" reports. So these wipeouts (especially of the total kind) have got to be engineered by the Klausner Protection Squad™ (and similar gangs of shills manipulating the social environment on Amazon's site). I wonder how they do it... do they call Amazon on the phone and bitch about poor little Harriet being abused, or do they have some special Amazon-supplied button that only shills know about, or do they "report-this" five million times on every comment of the poster they want to get rid of? Do they assemble forces, or do they use their sock-puppet accounts? Do both "purchase" and "no-purchase" accounts work, or it has to be only one kind? ... Do we have any disgruntled Amazon employees who could shed light on internal workings of Amazon's Klausner Defense Machine? How does it work in practice?

Well, anyway. Let's welcome Simon into the manly ranks of disappeared-by-Amazon. Not that we ever had any doubts about Simon's virtue, but today his human decency has been confirmed by the enemy itself — no higher compliment can be hoped for.

Johnny Boy on Klausner

Hurried Klausner "reviews" something called One Night Is Never Enough, which produces a number of comments, one of which, by "Johnny Boy", is especially right on the money. Johnny says (click to enlarge):

The only things I'd add are:
(1) most likely, Klausner did not read even in 1999 when her current account starts, and that I suspect because she'd worked in a similar area earlier — she had probably been producing these accursed blurbs since forever, it's just that before 1999 she didn't post them on Amazon (under this account, at least; I can't remember when Amazon reviews started, but Amazon itself started in 1995, initially without reviews; people do report seeing "a customer" reviews signed "Harriet Klausner" from earlier that 1999; myself I haven't seen them).

I suspect this "career" of hers began when she was, as she claims, an acquisitions librarian — which is not a librarian, really, but more like a buyer for a store (bookstore/library in this case). She was probably put in a position to determine or recommend what gets purchased, and there being no shortage of commercial entities eager to have their stuff purchased, you can bet your you know what, the Klausner postion could be profitably exploited — and that would have to be well before the advent of the internet and Amazon.¹

As far as how much she "read" back then, too bad we can't now go back to the beginning of her record and see: about a year ago Amazon made it impossible (earlier you could scroll through the whole thing; now it'll let you about a year back and then give you an error message that is made to look like something intermittent, "temporarily-unavailable-please-try-later" sort ot thing, which is a lie: in reality you can try later till you're blue in the face, but it'll never let you past the last year's worth of reviews in anyone's record. I do remember (from before that change) that the first review on the current Klausner account was from the second half of November 1999. But with Amazon's newly introduced hiding of traces we can't check a reveiwer's reviewing pattern anymore. Very smart of them, 'cause I was just about to start on a piece of software that would produce a reviewer's statistics from his reviewing history; now I can't get to this history, of course; they nipped the very idea in the bud before they even knew there was a bud. Pretty smart, eh?²

(2) About your

Did she read anywhere near as much as she posted? Of course not. That's impossible. Nobody, and I don't care how good of a reader you are or how much time on your hands you have, can read 90 books in one day or even two days. It's mathematically and scientifically impossible, unless you were literally to go nonstop (no bathroom breaks, no eating, nothing), which I am about 99.99999% sure Harriet cannot do.

Are you saying that you could read 90 books in a day if you never took a leak? This is crazy, my man. I'm sure it's just a rhetorical slip on your part, but let's be clear about one thing: Harriet Klausner is a preposterous insolent fraud — no ifs and buts and taking or not taking a leak. That's what makes her the well-deserved No.1: while with many reviewers it's possible that they're dishonest, with Harriet it is absolutely impossible that she's honest. Nothing a simple mortal could possibly resort to could enable one to achieve what she claims to have achieved: she's been posting, on average, six reviews a day since November 1999! Taking (or not taking) a leak, posting subhuman gibberish, idiot proliferation of non-existing subgenres, endless errors of fact — things like that do matter, but they add very little to the fundamental fact that no human can read six books a day every day of every month for eleven years. And this six-a-day is the overall average: her shorter-term averages are far higer sometimes.

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Notes.
1. Actually, Krapusner writes on her own site:

I was born in the Bronx where I obtained a Masters in Library Science. My thesis topic was the Impact of Science Fiction Reading by High School Seniors on Standardized Reading Scores. I met my spouse Stan when he read my palm in a Bronx outdoor cafe. [let's skip a bit of this nauseating marivaudage and get to the chase] [...] where [Harrisburg, PA] I worked in the local bookstore and provided some limited book reviewing services. [...]

That was, as you can imagine, quite some time ago, well before Amazon's shill enablement and Harriet's taking advantage of it in the late 1999.

2: Now, think of it, for people that smart, how hard would it be to disallow mass-posting of crap a la Klausner? (Allow everyone ten book reviews a month: this will let every real reader review 120 books a year — more than adequate for a simple mortal, methinks.) Or what about shutting down people who use multiple "verified" accounts to review the same item multiple times or to mass-vote for the same review? Or authors reviewing (five-stars) their own books, openly, posting under their own name? Or using stacks of bullshit, no-purchase accounts to vote on comments and "report this" buttons — a complete free-for-all a casual visitor isn't even aware of? Technically, none of this is difficult to put an end to, yet Amazon doesn't do it, so one must assume their lack of action is political, not technical, meaning that Amazon's reviewing system is defective as it is not by omission but by design: to all appearances, Amazon loves shills; enabling their massive attack on the consumer has probably been part of their "understanding" with vendors who sell through Amazon.

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Unrelated: btw, yesterday I decided to conduct my semiannual test of the Klausner Voting Shield: I negged a review of hers. I was pleased to see the vote show up upon the next refresh, but yet another refresh showed the vote removed: which is a sign of active vote filtering. Once more, to those who don't know: I never vote on Klausner reviews (other than a test like this; previous took place near a year ago) and so I cannot possibly qualify as her "fan", negative or positive (we talked about this before). So why is Amazon protecting Harriet? No wonder she's clawing back up in rank lately. (More on that in our Does Harriet Klausner have a special dispensation from Amazon?.)