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Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

Granted, it is on my bookshelf…

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

First, the info dump: Last week, Amazon Publishing had its very first million-copy-selling author. The imprint is AmazonCrossing, the author is Oliver Pötzch, and the figures are the combined print, audio, and eBook sales of his Hangman’s Daughter series. Pötzch’s books were originally published in his native German and subsequently acquired and translated by Amazon for digital distribution.

Now, the question: What does this mean? Smarter people than I can investigate the business ramifications of this. But my research to make heads or tails of this development has brought me up against a lot less examination and a lot more feelings. Amazon seems to be a lynchpin. It’s at the center of the push and pull between print and digital; and the loudest voices are emotional ones.

I’ve written about this before: I love a good brick-and-mortar bookstore, and I love holding a physical book in my hands. (And perhaps, selfishly, I love showing off my small library to people as well.) But what I love more is people reading. And right now, we can see teens buying more books more quickly than ever, and it’s all thanks to them embracing eBooks and discovering reading material through social networking. We’re going to get a generation of literate readers because good books are more accessible and kids are talking about them.

“You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn’t know this, of course you still can’t understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that’s what counts.”

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

When it comes to reading, it’s not the mode of delivery, it’s the content.

—Michael

Heading into the Holiday Season: How much do Customer Reviews affect your book-buying choices?

Friday, November 16th, 2012

In a way, judging a book by a cover is now judging a book by its customer reviews. Not entirely but close. I’m speaking from personal experience here – customer reviews, particularly Amazon reviews, strongly influence my decision when buying a book. That may be sad, but it’s a fact, and for all you haters, I don’t think I’m alone in this.

This is why corporations have been known to hire fake reviewers to sway potential buyers. In fact, a recent New York Times article, “The Best Reviews Money Can Buy,” revealed a man who coordinated this activity, by the name of Todd Rutherford. His website, GettingBookReviews.com, ended up commissioning over 4,000 reviews, all of them “fake.” That’s right. In other words, just like judging a book by its cover has always been a dangerous way to approach life, so too is judging a book by its customer reviews, leading to the risk of being deceived by superficialities. Todd Rutherford proves this idea.

The main question sites such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble need to ask: How much do customer reviews sway the potential buyer’s choice to read a book or not?

Take a book like Fifty Shades of Grey (wow, this is the second time I’ve mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey on this blog). Receiving 3 stars on Amazon is actually a bad thing. It’s like receiving a C in school nowadays – in other words, the new F is now a C and the new C is a B – that whole thing. And yet – sheer hype and word of mouth has carried the book far beyond its expectations, which begs the question further about how effective or ineffective are Amazon reviews.

The list of questions only grows exponentially from there. For example:

 Is there a new way of how buyers rate products?

Are there ways to screen out fake reviewers?

What fair solutions can there be for books with under 100 reviews versus those with, say, 1000 reviews?

I can list about a thousand more questions about this issue.

Meanwhile, it is my opinion that if you are going to let yourself judge a book by the reviews (and I mean, honestly think about how much reviews affect your opinion…don’t be like, “Oh, I am not one of those people.” Introspect some and really think about it…really think). What is the best way for the consumer to voice their opinion right now?

Simple.

Write thoughtful reviews. Don’t leave reviews up to the naysayers or the fakers or any other label you want to insert into the blank. This is why I have constructed 3 brief examples of Amazon reviews that you should NOT write, taken from various Amazon customer reviews (for books) on the site. Some of the criteria may be VERY obvious to some people. For others, this list can serve as a gentle reminder. Without further ado, here they are:

 

1)    Don’t Be Dramatic or Over-exaggerate.

This is the number one issue with customer reviews – people are emotional or angry about their purchase and then they say things that are just ridiculous or unfair. Take the review here: “Most horrible thing ever written.” Clearly, the author hasn’t really thought the review through. “Death is better” tops it off. Amazon reviews are neither the time nor place to use hyperbole.

2) Try to keep an open-mind when reviewing a book

Don’t let religious or personal viewpoints affect the experiences of others. Furthermore, try to approach the work with a fresh set of eyes. Comparing the work to the previous work of the same author is only human, but assure yourself that you aren’t over exaggerating because your expectations were too high. It’s not the author’s fault that you may have had unrealistic expectations.

3) Don’t Rate Amazon – Rate the Book!

A Simple Solution to this issue: Amazon needs to provide specific categories to rate (like Purchasing Process, Writing Style, etc.) much like Audible who –ironically– is owned by Amazon. For the time being, make sure you realize that Amazon or the purchase price is not being rated, the book is! Be fair to the author – they don’t have much say in this whole process.

Plain and simple: customer reviews can hold a lot of punch, so write a careful and thoughtful review. Moreover, think of the whole review process like when are you making any other judgment — You can’t just write a review when you are extremely happy or extremely mad or if you had a bad day. Make an effort to contribute when you feel indifferent or content or any other emotion that is more neutral. Well-balanced reviews seem to be missing in the book-buying world.

All in all, the whole process is broken. Hopefully, sites like Amazon will see this through and have a smart, innovative worker or team of workers who use imagination to spark a whole new way of looking at the e-book purchasing process. If anything, Goodreads.com might be a slightly healthier alternative.

Your New BEAU: The Great Reading Race

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

I never thought I’d ask this, but is reading more really better?

Before I get ahead of myself, I have been scanning some stats from this study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project on e-reading, highlighting this key point: people with Kindles and Nooks et al. read an average of 24 books a year, whereas print readers consume an average of 15 books in a year. And, well, as an exclusively print reader, I feel a little slighted. What are they trying to say about me? That I am not as voracious a reader? That I am slow? How dare they insinuate based on their “statistics” and “averages.” And just what 24 books are these e-reading people devouring in a year? Probably only a few books of comparable substance and 21 romance novels. Yeah.

What they’re really saying, it seems: print slows the average reader down.

Which brings me to my quantity v. quality question. What’s wrong with my 15 book average? Things move so fast in this digital age; everyone wants what they want to appear before them in a fraction of a second, and the faster you can move the more you can get done, more than the other guy, and you always want to stay ahead of the other guy. Maybe print readers don’t run through as many books, but maybe we get more out of the books we read.

And maybe not. Let’s not stereotype. There are plenty of thoughtful e-readers out there and thoughtless print-readers. My point is, I guess, what’s with the numbers comparison? Just how many books I complete in a year should not be a contest; it should not earn you some merit badge. Reading shouldn’t be a race. As much as Joel Stein thinks adults are wasting precious time reading YA books when they could be catching up on “3,000 years of fiction written for adults,” I would here like to grant the world permission to read what it likes, at whatever pace suits it, and get out of it what it will.

And, of course, the requisite advertisement, promoting the love of print: Watch a Book Being Born. Think back to a time when creating the written word for circulation required significant labor (hand-typesetting, hand-sewing, and even, before the printing press, hand-copying). Think about the time it took to just create a printed book. And consider giving that book as much time in your hands as it spent in the hands of its maker.

Slow down. It’s not a race.