Useless book reviews

This one is not a proper blog post. It’s more of a comment on something I saw that was quite amusing. It somehow reminded me of this political season.

I love books. It is no secret. I love science. That’s no secret either. As many others like me surely do, I keep a “wish list” at Amazon.com of books on the topics I like. One of the things that I like about it is that it is very easy to search the books that are “coming soon”. It brings a nice anticipation that sometimes lives to its promise, but some other times brings just disappointment. Such is the nature of life itself.

Anyway, I am watching an upcoming book. Its topic is not important at this moment, but I want to say that its ostensible thesis is one that I strongly feel that is wrong. I would like to take a look at it nonetheless to see what it has to say. It is the science way.

A couple of days ago I was surprised to see a rating. Sometimes that happens because there are some lucky people who have early access to books (lucky b******s… (:-)…). This particular one was a 1-star rating, which is the lowest rating that you can give a book at Amazon. I read it and this is the amusing part: the “review” essentially said something in the lines of “…I have not read the book, but I know it’s going to suck.” (I’m paraphrasing).

It does not stop there. A 5-star “review” appeared, I think it was the very next day after I saw the bad “review”. This one said something like “… looking forward to reading the book.” (I’m paraphrasing again).

So, solely on its average rating, this upcoming book is already mediocre, BASED ON NO INFORMATION WHATSOEVER!

This reminds me of partisan politics. Have fun figuring out why (it is not that hard)…

Baldie out.

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0 Comments

  1. I’d be curious to know how these “reviews” got on the site in the first place. I used to be an Amazon Vine members. These lucky people are given the chance to win products before they came out, some times after, in exchange for hones reviews. The Vine members were (and I thought still are) the only ones who can review coming soon books. The review link is locked for everyone else. The rules for reviewers dictated that no short non helpful post got through, so I find it odd that this has happened. I would bring these review to Amazon’s attention and ask how they got posted.
    It is reviews like this that make Amazon reviews worthless, except as topics of conversations on how not to review a book.

Thanks for your comment. I will do my best to reply soon; be nice!