There was an interesting article in the Boston Globe yesterday about how publishing houses are taking notice of customer reviews. There are some of the usual slights against that kind of content being legit:
- Some members of the professional book-reviewing community have their doubts as to whether the Amazon.com pieces are valid reviews. For one thing, they are unedited and often anonymous. An author's friends could submit rave reviews, and customers would be none the wiser.
I think it's kinda fun when the 'non-traditional' media makes the other guys nervous.
Most amazing fact in the article: the 'winner' in the category of most reviews posted to amazon.com: Pennsylvania librarian Harriet Klausner...4,811 reviews!!! Yow!!!
(First posted on Mark Is Cranky)
.jpg?t=20120209092158)
Article comments
1 - Hazy Dave
I haven't checked lately, but at one time there was a thriving subculture of guerilla reviews of Family Circus books. Lots of literary references, NYT Book Review parody, postmodern psychosexual analysis and purely surreal reviews of the banal adventures of Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, et al.
Hmmm, "Daddy's Cap Is On Backwards" - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0449148165/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/102-1257563-8008102?v=glance&s=books&vi=customer-reviews - looks like the richest vein at the moment.
"...PJ, now the viceroy of Egypt, reveals himself to his brothers as the boy whom they sold into servitude years before. Nothing can compare, however, to the episode where Jeffy hurls his harpoon at the great white whale, it fails to meet its mark, and is reclaimed by the Rhine-maidens as it descends into the waters, while flames from the untended hilltop fire engulf the island paradise, tossing a firebrand onto the raft where little Billy and the runaway slave... "