[osnova]

I publish mostly public domain books, mostly Bibles and Christian books. I spend months (for some books years) to OCR (when there are no good text sources available already), proofread (most sources available online require this step), format, make best navigation, work on a clean-transparent organization for books with complicated structure, crossreferences, collections, etc. As the result, I typically set my price at $5 but I don't chase a large number of sales believing that if people really want quality Christian books, sooner or later they will find out about OSNOVA.

Recently (I first saw his books in January), I noticed one "competitor" who flooded Kindle Store and B&N with Bibles, Korans, Mormon Books, etc. Apparently, he uses several alter egos and publishes the same books multiple times with different titles and different covers (covers are not bad). Within the first couple of days after his publications become available they have a dozen glowing five-star "reviews," that's even when the ranking does not show any sales. If you are a publisher you must know how long it takes to get a number of reviews unless you are in the top 100. Then, his sales start growing. If negative reviews appear, they are countered with many more five-star reviews. The price is low enough that a sufficient number of people wouldn't mind to not bother with refunds.

Although I can't prove it on Amazon, it seems that this person (or people) also attacks his competitors (including such as Zondervan, etc.) with one-star reviews. Some of one-star reviews that I've received seem to be "fake," they either don't make sense or have absolutely false claims. I do know that there are folks out there that "honestly" post one-stars for any Bible that they can find to make a statement but these "fake" reviews are not even that. On B&N, it is much worse, because the accounts there can be opened without providing a credit card, there is no public review history for reviewers, and "reviews" and stars are multiplied into hundreds. I am not the only one who noticed this because I saw some other Bible publishers "warn" him in the comments.

This fraud can become a big problem unless Amazon and B&N start policing such behavior. They can easily track if a certain IP address, or proxy, starts posting tons of either five or one-star reviews under different accounts.

So far, the only thing that I have come up to counter this as a small publisher, is to make calls to my customers to write a positive review when they write a "thank you" to me. I do not want to start a "war" with this guy because he appear to have "resources" to "kill" any publication with one-star reviews (I think I saw a spat between him and another publisher on B&N whom he drove into oblivion).