[thrawn_aj]

Originally Posted by leebase

All that will do is devalue Amazon's reviews as a place people look to. It won't hurt sales. It just reduces the utility that previously had been quite useful.

Lee

Not at all. Only a very tiny fraction of one-star reviews are useful in my experience. The campaign hurts the authors, but Amazon is so far ahead of other sources as a one-stop-shop (this is important) for reviews of pretty much everything (from books to whatever) that it will take a lot more than this to reduce its utility. Plus, user ratings of reviews are still largely uncorrupted so it is laughably easy for me to filter out the price-angst ones. Just sort by most helpful (that's the default anyway) and you can still look at the useful negative reviews.

Besides, you miss the biggest point here. It's not about hurting sales (directly). It just has a lot of nuisance value when it comes to the eventual consequences. When big-name authors get a whiff of the publisher's ... stuff ... sticking to their shoes, I'd expect them to complain ... loudly. The authors know that public outrage is a fickle beast - it is very easy and in fact more common (as this campaign has demonstrated) for the beast to charge at the most visible target rather than the most culpable .

The combines rating of a product mostly hurts the reputation of the author - as you said: it doesn't even hurt sales.

I am by no means endorsing this tactic, but as a tactic, it is far from misguided on the part of both the militant reviewers and Amazon. Amazon has brilliantly set itself up as the hero in the piece while (passively) encouraging customers to use the publishers as their punching bag. Of course, if I were Amazon, my long-term strategy would be to establish a lower price point and eventually use that fact as leverage to get the publishers to lower their wholesale rates (hardcover) further.