Schneier on Ebook Fraud

[dadioflex]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

I've talked to a few slushpile readers, mostly from SF magazines, over the years.

You know how bad you imagine the slushpile to be?

It's worse.

And now, with the advent of ebooks, that slushpile is for sale on Amazon.

FWIW, I read slush for Raygunrevival and have been pretty impressed with the quality of the slushpile. I guess it's worse for more high profile magazines.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

The readers of any decent ebook site need to be given the collective power to delete any and all reviews they deem to be unworthy of being.

So, for example, religious believers could delete positive reviews of an anti-religious book, and non-believers could delete reviews of a religious book? I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.

[elcreative]

But there are positive advantages... maybe we could delete giggles

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

So, for example, religious believers could delete positive reviews of an anti-religious book, and non-believers could delete reviews of a religious book? I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

The professional reviewers are known to set up multiple accounts, deleting false reviews is curing the symptom while ignoring the disease.

But are you referring to running all reviews through a filter after submitting but before publishing? That has possibilities but I am mainly interested in the power of collective human cognition. Until we do develop a strong AI, the best judge of a reviews merit is going to be the users of a review site themselves. The readers of any decent ebook site need to be given the collective power to delete any and all reviews they deem to be unworthy of being.

That would put too much power in the hands of fringe lunatics. Amazon removed a lot of books a while ago due to co-ordinated pressure from such people.

An automated system could flag suspicious posts for manual review based on keywords, interval between purchase and posting, geographic location of poster, similarity between other posts by that person, all sorts of things.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

An automated system could flag suspicious posts for manual review based on keywords, interval between purchase and posting, geographic location of poster, similarity between other posts by that person, all sorts of things.

Amazon doesn't require purchase to post a review; they want people to post reviews of books they already own.

This mostly falls under "all complex ecosystems have parasites"--it doesn't matter how effective your scarecrows & pesticides are; if you don't assign a human to protect the crops at some point, bugs & birds will destroy the field. Amazon & many other sites want an all-automated protection system, and it's never going to be entirely effective, and never going to be effective enough after activity gets past a certain level.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

So, for example, religious believers could delete positive reviews of an anti-religious book, and non-believers could delete reviews of a religious book? I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.

No review would be deleted by a simple click from one person or even groups of people. There are methods to contain the actions of fringe groups bent on removing all references to a certain subject, such as send messages to all interested parties asking whether or not they wish the content to remain on the site, the number of votes for the content or against would surely increase and the action to take would be more inline to the wishes of the site's population.

Of course I haven't thought my plan all the way through, since everything is always subject to change, there's never an end to anything.

Originally Posted by elcreative

But there are positive advantages... maybe we could delete giggles

Yes that is a possibility

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

That would put too much power in the hands of fringe lunatics. Amazon removed a lot of books a while ago due to co-ordinated pressure from such people.

The problem there was that Amazon decided to take action internally rather than leave the decision in the hands of its userbase.

Please keep in mind that these problems will vanish in a copyright free world where everything is able to be read before purchasing.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

There are methods to contain the actions of fringe groups bent on removing all references to a certain subject, such as send messages to all interested parties asking whether or not they wish the content to remain on the site, the number of votes for the content or against would surely increase and the action to take would be more inline to the wishes of the site's population.

How do you determine who the interested parties are?

For example, let's not even go into politics or religion here, but deal simply with terrible books. There are some hideous abominations out there which have multiple 5-star reviews, sometimes from the author's family and friends, sometimes from his or her dedicated fans (in the latter case, tirades from the author, while not mandatory, add a certain cachet). If you have the author and five people who know them IRL posting glowing reviews for a book, and one person posting an honest warning about its similarity to a black hole, who are the "interested parties" in this case? Who gets a vote on whether that review is allowed to remain? Should the rest of the people who use that website but haven't actually read the book in question get a vote? How do you tell which ones have read the book, anyway? If Abe bought it for Betty, which of the two of them gets to post a review?

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

There are some hideous abominations out there which have multiple 5-star reviews, sometimes from the author's family and friends, sometimes from his or her dedicated fans (in the latter case, tirades from the author, while not mandatory, add a certain cachet). If you have the author and five people who know them IRL posting glowing reviews for a book, and one person posting an honest warning about its similarity to a black hole, who are the "interested parties" in this case? Who gets a vote on whether that review is allowed to remain? Should the rest of the people who use that website but haven't actually read the book in question get a vote? How do you tell which ones have read the book, anyway? If Abe bought it for Betty, which of the two of them gets to post a review?

Your abomination is my organic masterpiece.

We expect instantaneous access and results, but when it comes to books we might also have to expect delays. An upload to a user generated content system specifically tailored for books would probably require a month before being allowed onto the system's marketplace. Exceptions could be made of course but they would be rare.

This time would be spent sending the book to interested parties, those involved who wish to review books before they are released to the general public. Issues would arise (formatting,typographical,content) and be addressed, while at the same time reviews would be written. This is how books have been made in the past and how they will be made in the future.

Reviews written by those whom the system is unable to determine if they have read the book or not will be placed into a special review category. We could call the two review categories internal and external. It would seem to me that the internal reviews, those written while the book was under actual review would be much more influential.

At the moment I am debating whether or not external reviews will even be needed, except perhaps as a sort of sideshow, allowing those who wish to the ability to give stars to a book or perhaps link to their own reviews written on their own personal site. This would keep the book's page on the authentic site (the site of main download) as clutter free as possible with a few reviews.

The main idea is that since you are able to read the entire book before purchasing, the reviews won't hold as much weight as they once did, they will still be useful though, a well written review will most definitely sway you towards reading or not reading as the case may be.

This system might sound a little closed, but I assure you it is not. Openness means inclusion and anyone would certainly be able to submit themselves to become an interested party and be able to write reviews.

But to answer your question, the interested parties could also be the set of all users, any controversial review would be flagged by a user and then responded to. If a user flags reviews repeatedly which ultimately should not have been flagged, determined by the votes of the interested parties, the original review flagger would lose their review flagging privileges and possibly monies from affiliate sales, if referrer tracking on books was enabled and I think that it should be.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Your abomination is my organic masterpiece.

We expect instantaneous access and results, but when it comes to books we might also have to expect delays. An upload to a user generated content system specifically tailored for books would probably require a month before being allowed onto the system's marketplace. Exceptions could be made of course but they would be rare.

This time would be spent sending the book to interested parties, those involved who wish to review books before they are released to the general public. Issues would arise (formatting,typographical,content) and be addressed, while at the same time reviews would be written. This is how books have been made in the past and how they will be made in the future.

Reviews written by those whom the system is unable to determine if they have read the book or not will be placed into a special review category. We could call the two review categories internal and external. It would seem to me that the internal reviews, those written while the book was under actual review would be much more influential.

What happens if it is a book that nobody in the review team wants to read?

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

What happens if it is a book that nobody in the review team wants to read?

The review team pool will be quite large so I expect this to happen rarely if at all. Members of the review team will be sent books to review based on their genre preferences and author genre tags. There could also be incentives for reviewing, small amounts from each sale of a book could be given to the reviewers of the book. This will of course bait the hooligans but steps can be taken to keep them out. But weak reviews will result in weak sales/donations so any hooligan wishing to game the system by writing fraudulent reviews will find that their prior methods no longer work.

A limit on the number of books published in a certain time frame might need to be set as well, we aren't talking about a big box book website here, we are talking about a local estore.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

There could also be incentives for reviewing, small amounts from each sale of a book could be given to the reviewers of the book. This will of course bait the hooligans but steps can be taken to keep them out. But weak reviews will result in weak sales/donations so any hooligan wishing to game the system by writing fraudulent reviews will find that their prior methods no longer work.

That in itself would lead to review abuse of the opposite type. Who would give a less than glowing review to something that they have the potential to profit from?

Originally Posted by Giggleton

we aren't talking about a big box book website here, we are talking about a local estore.

How can you have anything local on the internet? I don't think I would want to have to submit work for review to lots of local mini-stores and wait for them all to go live. It's bad enough having to put them on different warez sites instead of just one big central one for them to filter down from, that would create too much extra work.

But I do like the idea of geo-restricting them to people who live in Barnsley. It would save me the worry of whether anyone else would understand a word of it.

[=X=]

@osnova Do you have a bishop's imprimatur approval for the Catholic bible you are selling?

That would be a big boon if you did, right now I'm using a PDF that is an exact copy of the original, but it would be even better to have the Kindle version.


=X=

[elcreative]

I think you should probably include Harrogate as well to give you a larger buying public...

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

But I do like the idea of geo-restricting them to people who live in Barnsley. It would save me the worry of whether anyone else would understand a word of it.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

That in itself would lead to review abuse of the opposite type. Who would give a less than glowing review to something that they have the potential to profit from?

How can you have anything local on the internet? I don't think I would want to have to submit work for review to lots of local mini-stores and wait for them all to go live. It's bad enough having to put them on different warez sites instead of just one big central one for them to filter down from, that would create too much extra work.

The writers of those types of reviews would be easily discovered, also while access to the site would be completely open, access to the internal review pool and thus the incentives would be tightly controlled by all members of the review pool. Writing fraudulent reviews would result in your review writing privileges being revoked.

A lot of people are still trapped in the buying and selling paradigm, you won't have to list your books anywhere except perhaps the original site. If your book is popular enough the readers will share your book for you. The ideal solution would be to enable the sharing of these books through the ereader. There's some work to be done for sure but I think there exists a good portion of writers such as yourself? Who would be very willing to subject their work to a rigorous peer review in exchange for some marketing help.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by elcreative

I think you should probably include Harrogate as well to give you a larger buying public...

What? Harrogate's in NORTH Yorkshire. That's practically another country, and they all talk funny up there.