Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
There's no problem to solve and there's nothing wrong with using reviews to protest any aspect of a book.
|
Actually, there are two problems to be solved:
1) Permanent reviews for a temporary condition.
2) A "review" by someone who didn't read the book is inherently dishonest. "Review" means you've
viewed the book at least once. You can't review a book if you haven't read it at least once.
I think separating the price of a book from the content as a separate part of a review would be a good solution. It wouldn't be the fork in the eye to authors that some people seem to want, but it would at least be fair.
I fully support people tagging books with "9.99 boycott", etc. That's viewable by people reading the information on a book, and it doesn't imply the tagger has actually read it. Or you could start a forum in the Amazon forums to protest the book's price. But when people read through reviews of a book, they expect to see
reviews of a book. (Shocking, I know.
)
See, here's the thing: When someone clicks on a book on Amazon, they already know what the price is. They've made peace with that. A review telling them the price is too high gives them absolutely no information.
Zero. So your little protest doesn't dissuade people from buying the book based on price. The only
possible effect it can have is to lead people to believe that the book
itself isn't good (based on its effect on the average rating). So you're not educating anyone. At best, you're engaged in conscientious vandalism. Because it doesn't really matter what Amazon thinks of the reviews. The reviews are for the people who might want to read the book. Those are the stakeholders you're screwing over.