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Originally Posted by C.I.Bond
But serious would you leave 2 reviews saying the same darn thing? Who does that and thinks it's ethical?
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You were under the misapprehension that people who boost the ratings of their own books, or get family and friends to do it for them, think it's ethical?
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Why doesn't Amazon prevent this since they are putting all the reviews in the same pile regardless of the medium reviewed - hardcover, paperback, Kindle.
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I would guess, because it's harder for them to spot fakes than it is for bogus reviewers to create them. I've never tried, true, but I'd guess I could set up an outrageous number of Amazon accounts using a similar number of freemail addresses -- gmail, etc. -- and proxies so my IP is different. With those, as long as I don't use exactly the same words, the level of analysis (computer or human) that would catch my glowing (but fake) reviews would produce too many false positives for real reviewers that just happened to like the book.
In the end, the only real protection is ourselves. Look at the reviewers' other reviews. Check multiple sources -- trusted blogs, for instance, or for that matter just about anything that's been around longer than that author (though that doesn't always work; there are blogs solely to promote scams, apparently on a pay-for-placement basis). Read an excerpt. Check around MobileRead. And accept that you'll sometimes wind up with a dud anyway ... we all do, if we read enough, even if it's only on dead trees, as my "to be sold" pile demonstrates.