Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob G.
Actually, you would be mistaken. One of the review police emailed Amazon about taking the Kindle protests down and were told they were within Amazon's guidelines.
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Sometimes I wonder if Amazon even knows what their own guidelines are. They say reviewers should refrain from mentioning "Availability, price, or alternative ordering/shipping informat." But they also say reviews should refrain from commenting on other reviews, and we know they never take off those reviews. Like you said, reviews on political books are useless. On the other hand, they have removed
legitimate negative reviews when an author complained enough.
If they left them on, people would probably buy more books because of the controversy.
And why are they letting people post "The book came in great condition and was shipped on time" as a review?! Gah! :tongue
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
Why shouldn't you be allowed to comment on the binding, paper, printing or typesetting quality of a paper book? Those are part of the product you get when you buy it (and you don't need to actually buy it to have something useful to say, you could have seen it in a bookstore, or gotten it as a gift). The same can be applied to ebooks, you can comment on the formatting, crappy OCR, obnoxious DRM or whatever.
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I don't think people should have to buy the book to review it. I have lots of books I bought from another vendor, got for free, borrowed, etc. That doesn't mean I don't have anything to say about them.
Also, I think binding, paper, printing, typesetting, etc. are part of the content, as are bad formatting in an e-book. I've read lots of helpful reviews that mentioned those things as a part of a review. But I think there's a difference between "I didn't finish this book because I couldn't get past the typos" and "I will not buy this because of the DRM." I would rather read about the DRM, etc. in the forum or in the comments. Or heck, couldn't someone start a thread on a board like this, or even a blog, that lists books they're refusing to buy for those reasons? Then they would have more control over what appears.