Fake reviews: when S*** is not a three-star mark for the letter S

A friend told me recently that her new book just got two really, really good reviews on Amazon – but those reviews were deleted shortly afterwards. She’s reached out to Amazon but the company won’t tell her anything: it will only discuss reviews with the people who wrote the reviews. And reportedly it ain’t going to say much to them either. If Amazon, or more likely, some automated Amazon algorithm thinks a review is a fake then it’s deleted. So even Amazon knows fake reviews are a problem.

They would. We’ve already become suspicous of online reviews – not just on Amazon but everywhere – such that if something has five stars then we’re raising eyebrows. Intellectually, we know if something has just one star then that’s probably suspicious too but still we tend to believe it. We should watch that.

But the best outcome is that we tend to believe – to correctly believe – only middle-rating reviews. Which means over time that reviews are pointless to us: if you only trust the three-star ratings ones then reviews are no use to you because everything has three star ones somewhere.

So it would be better for all of us if we could trust reviews. We would buy more or at least buy more readily – which means it would be better for Amazon if we could trust reviews. Consequently the company is taging action. It’s just not working.

Have a read of The Wirecutter’s take on what’s happening, what Amazon is trying to do and what you can do about it yourself.

Amazon Prime Day on 15 July

I think I’m recommending this, I think I am. It’s going to be like Amazon’s lightning sales where the fun, such as it is, in seeing what they offer next. This time they’re going to be offering, I think, seven major items on this Amazon Prime Day of 15 July 2015.

Seven major items spaced out through the day and then – have I really got this right? – new lightning sales every ten minutes.

But.

You only get this if you’re an Amazon Prime member. That’s the big benefit for Amazon, pushing this service. I have no trouble with that because I can see many situations where it’s a bargain for us. I don’t use Amazon enough that the Prime membership’s free postage makes enough of a difference but if it does, you get in there. If you want to watch Outlander, too, that’s a TV show that is exclusively available on Amazon Prime in the UK.

Plus, you can sign up to Amazon Prime now and change your mind. I presume being a member on 15 July counts even if you cancel your membership on 16 July. And you can: sign up for a free trial now and cancel it before the end of the period.

Can you tell I’m on the fence a bit here? I don’t want to be persuaded into spending more money than I need but also I do like online sales where you get some new deal every so often. I’ll be looking into it at least so I wanted to be sure you knew about it too.

Here’s everything Amazon is saying about Prime Day. Presumably it’ll be updated more and more through the week.

Amazon to pay authors per page read

From next month, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library will pay out royalties “based on the number of pages read”.

So if your book is opened on someone’s Kindle and they leave page 1 on there long enough that they could’ve read it, you get cash. It’s not entirely 1 page equals 1 payment: instead, the money comes from a pot that is shared amongst all authors whose work gets included and then gets read. Says Amazon:

Here are some examples of how it would work if the fund was $10M and 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:
The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).

The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $2,000 ($10 million multiplied by 20,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).

The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed 100 times but only read halfway through on average would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).

Kindle Unlimited Pages Read – Amazon

It’s that bit about a page not actually being read, there’s no way to know that, but it needs to be open on the Kindle for long enough that it could have been. There’s got to be a way to game that.

Read the full Amazon detail, though be warned it’s (possibly deliberately) the most boring thing you’ll see today.

The first thing you’ll say is: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

It won’t work, but you’ll say it. For Amazon has released the Amazon Echo, a product simultaneously so naff you will never buy it and so right that you soon will. Maybe a couple of generations down the road.

For speaking of generations and actually also speaking of speaking, the Amazon Echo is another Star Trek-style invention. Just as you talk to Siri on your iPhone, you chat to Echo in your house. Here’s how Amazon sees this happening but stick around for an alternative view:

Naturally, that video has been parodied and naturally some of the parodies are very good – most especially this quite subtle, underplayed one. The funny thing is, I’m more persuaded by this than Amazon’s original. Mind you, that is partly because it’s also edited better.

You can’t buy the Amazon Echo yet: it’s only in the USA and currently not really on sale. Instead, you have to request an invitation to have Amazon try to sell you it. More details and the start of non-stop pressure to buy on the official site – which says it will cost $199 or $99 for Amazon Prime users.

Funny. It’s just a couple of days since we saw the Onyx OnBeep go on sale: the chunky new wearable technology that looks like it will one day become the communicator pins from Star Trek: The Next Generation. If we get a Trek invention next week, cross your fingers for warp drive.

Eh? Get my book for £4,307.56 off

Friend of the blog John Soanes sent me this on Amazon. It’s my first The Blank Screen book going for £4,319.19 secondhand.

Now, I’ve seen it go for around the £60 mark and I liked that. I don’t see that cash but I was terribly chuffed that it was going up.

But it’s still on sale brand new so before you gawp like I did at the £4,319.19 price tag, click here to get it for £4,307.56 less.

And now, drum roll…

IMG_2658.JPG

Amazon: if you’re going to quote Orwell, do it right

I did not see this. But then I also haven’t written an email trying to paint myself as the goodie in the fight between Amazon and Hachette publishers. Previously I’ve confessed I’m a bit lost in the details yet Amazon’s email so enraged me that I’ve become, well, enraged.

The bit of the Amazon email that left the most bad taste in my mouth was the company’s bad taste in tying its commercial interests to the Second World War. But it also said this:

“The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if ‘publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.’ Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.”

An Important Kindle Request – email from Amazon (9 August 2014)

The New York Times was a bit more thorough than I was: it checked the source. The newspaper reports:

This perceived slur on the memory of one of the 20th century’s most revered truth-tellers might prove to be one of Amazon’s biggest public relations blunders since it deleted copies of “1984” from readers’ Kindles in 2009.

A moment’s web searching would have revealed to the Amazon Books Team, which is credited as the source of the Hachette post, that it was wildly misrepresenting this “famous author.”

When Orwell wrote that line, he was celebrating paperbacks published by Penguin, not urging suppression or collusion. Here is what the writer actually said in The New English Weekly on March 5, 1936: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

Orwell then went on to undermine Amazon’s argument for cheap e-books. “It is, of course, a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote, saying that the opposite was true.

“The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Instead of buying two expensive books, he said, the consumer will buy three cheap books and then use the rest of the money to go to the movies. “This is an advantage from the reader’s point of view and doesn’t hurt trade as a whole, but for the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller, it is a disaster,” Orwell wrote.In a Fight With Authors, Amazon Cites Orwell, but Not Quite Correctly – David Streitfeld, New York Times (10 August 2014)

NYT’s full piece also quotes a tweet to Amazon from technology journalist Glenn Fleishman, who wrote:

He was using irony. It’s a literary device. You sell books. What is wrong with you?

Update: Hachette responds to Amazon

I stayed out of this both on here and in my head because I thought Amazon vs Hachette would play itself out quickly, that there was doubtlessly posturing and arguments on both sides, and that I didn’t really understand all the ramifications anyway. Then Amazon sent out a cloying email that so antagonised me I had to vent about it. Apparently their plea for us to email Hachette worked enough, though, because now Hachette has replied publicly.

I still don’t understand all the ramifications. And I’m still not saying Amazon is the bad guy, I’ve just said that they write some really aggravatingly patronising bollocks in their emails. So for completeness, here’s the full text of Hachette’s response.

Thank you for writing to me in response to Amazon’s email. I appreciate that you care enough about books to take the time to write. We usually don’t comment publicly while negotiating, but I’ve received a lot of requests for Hachette’s response to the issues raised by Amazon, and want to reply with a few facts.

• Hachette sets prices for our books entirely on our own, not in collusion with anyone.
• We set our ebook prices far below corresponding print book prices, reflecting savings in manufacturing and shipping.
• More than 80% of the ebooks we publish are priced at $9.99 or lower.
• Those few priced higher—most at $11.99 and $12.99—are less than half the price of their print versions.
• Those higher priced ebooks will have lower prices soon, when the paperback version is published.
• The invention of mass-market paperbacks was great for all because it was not intended to replace hardbacks but to create a new format available later, at a lower price.
As a publisher, we work to bring a variety of great books to readers, in a variety of formats and prices. We know by experience that there is not one appropriate price for all ebooks, and that all ebooks do not belong in the same $9.99 box. Unlike retailers, publishers invest heavily in individual books, often for years, before we see any revenue. We invest in advances against royalties, editing, design, production, marketing, warehousing, shipping, piracy protection, and more. We recoup these costs from sales of all the versions of the book that we publish—hardcover, paperback, large print, audio, and ebook. While ebooks do not have the $2-$3 costs of manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping that print books have, their selling price carries a share of all our investments in the book.

This dispute started because Amazon is seeking a lot more profit and even more market share, at the expense of authors, bricks and mortar bookstores, and ourselves. Both Hachette and Amazon are big businesses and neither should claim a monopoly on enlightenment, but we do believe in a book industry where talent is respected and choice continues to be offered to the reading public.

Once again, we call on Amazon to withdraw the sanctions against Hachette’s authors that they have unilaterally imposed, and restore their books to normal levels of availability. We are negotiating in good faith. These punitive actions are not necessary, nor what we would expect from a trusted business partner.
Thank you again and best wishes,
Michael Pietsch [Hachette CEO]

Thanks to Digital Book World for the text and to Jason Arnopp for the tipoff.

Good old Amazon, fighting for our rights. Yeah.

This has been reported on extensively and derisively before so I don’t know why it’s taken this long to land in my inbox. But this morning I got a rallying call kind of email from Amazon, urging me to stand with their noble men and women as they fight the good fight against the wilful stupidity of publishers.

You can tell I’m on Amazon’s side. Clearly. Actually, before this email, I wasn’t exactly ambivalent but I was willing to see that there were points on both sides. Amazon wants cheaper ebooks, publishers want to survive. That doesn’t sound like my seeing both sides but I’m am truly finding it hard now because this email so annoyed me.

It’s a long email. It opens:

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

An Important Kindle Request – email from Amazon (9 August 2014)

Tasteful use of the Second World War there. The dispute and versions of this email have been reported on and analysed and had the sales figure maths in them ripped apart. And now 900 authors you’ve heard of have objected.

I’d like to add just one thing. Amazon states that ebooks should be cheaper because:

With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

I obviously tremendously appreciate that ink is worth more than my time and work actually writing the bloody thing. But that’s not it. This is: do you know that when you buy a Kindle ebook, Amazon charges the publisher for the cost of delivering it to you?

Whatever you’re thinking now, it begins with the words “Hang on…” and the thought that we download Kindle books off of the internet. There is no delivery cost.

There was. Back in the olden days, like five or six years ago, it could cost some money to deliver your book. Follow. You’re on a beach, you’ve got your Kindle device, you fancy a book, you buy it – all over what’s really a cellular mobile connection. You’re not paying for that but it costs money to run so Amazon would charge the publishers. It was and is called Whispernet, which I do think is a lovely name, and the bigger the book, the more publishers were charged.

I would like Amazon to be more upfront about its charges. Most everybody complains that Apple takes a lot with its 30% cut but it is 30% and you now know everything. With Amazon it’s this percent or it’s that, it’s this charge or it’s that. My counting-on-fingers calculation makes the two come out about even but it’s a choice of being annoyed how much Apple charges or aggrieved how sneakily Amazon does.

Nonetheless, this is today and this is not five or six years ago. If most Kindle downloads aren’t done over free wifi then at least most of them could be. There is at least far less call for a Whispernet surcharge, if there is a call for it at all.

But you don’t see any mention of that obsolete publishing expense in Amazon’s email the way you do warehousing.

I think this is a case of a company addressing an email to one audience while intending it to be read by a completely different one. I’m so aggravated by it that I find it hard to imagine any author agreeing with the way it’s written even if they, somehow, agree with Amazon’s logic. But unfortunately I can very easily imagine it convincing readers who have no need to know or interest in knowing what all this means.

I’m enraged at Amazon’s chutzpah but I think the email is clever. That just pisses me off even more. Enough so that I’m torn over whether to post the whole text or not. I obviously should for completeness yet I don’t want to encourage them and, actually, I don’t want to read it again.

But if you’ve read this far, I can’t leave you hanging or ask you go off doing Google searches. So here’s the complete text, stripped only of my email details at the top.

From: Amazon.com
An Important Kindle Request
9 August 2014 05:44

Dear KDP Author,

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.

The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.

Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.

Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We’ve quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.

And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read). A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures. And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.

We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.

Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: Michael.Pietsch@hbgusa.com

Copy us at: readers-united@amazon.com

Please consider including these points:

– We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
– Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
– Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
– Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

Thanks for your support.

The Amazon Books Team

P.S. You can also find this letter at www.readersunited.com

A polite objection to Kindle Unlimited

Well, I say polite. The original article has the ambiguous title of “Seriously, Fuck You, ‘Kindle Unlimited’:

Last week, Amazon informed us that for ten dollars per month, Kindle users can have unlimited access to over six hundred thousand books in its library. But it shouldn’t cost a thing to borrow a book, Amazon, you foul, horrible, profiteering enemies of civilisation.

Seriously, Fuck You ‘Kindle Unlimited’ – Maria Bustillos, The Awl (21 July 2014)

Now don’t mince words, what do you really mean?

For a monthly cost of zero dollars, it is possible to read six million e-texts at the Open Library, right now. On a Kindle, or any other tablet or screen thing. You can borrow up to five titles for two weeks at no cost, and read them in-browser or in any of several other formats (not all titles are supported in all formats, but most offer at least a couple): PDF, .mobi, Kindle or ePub (you’ll need to download the Bluefire Reader—for free—in order to read ePub format on Kindle.) I currently have on loan Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Original Sin by P.D. James, and The Dead Zone by Stephen King.

That’s nice. Here’s the thing, I want King, James and Moore (they sound like attorneys at law) to get paid. So I would in theory have no problem with Amazon charging a fee that included at least some money going to them.

But Amazon doesn’t go for details in its announcements. That’s why we always hear that the Kindle Fire has sold out but we never know whether they only made one of them. In this case, Kindle Unlimited definitely lets you borrow books but it’s tough to know which ones. Broadly speaking, right now the rule of thumb is that if you want to borrow it, it’s not available. Right now the selection is limited and must surely include books that are already out of copyright and available in all these other ways.

So right now, nuts to Kindle Unlimited. But it’s worth keeping an eye on.

And so is this Open Library of which Bustillos speaks. I’ve just followed her link to the Open Library site and signed up to check it out before hopefully checking out some books. There doesn’t appear to be any regional blocking yet; I was allowed through without any US address confirmation.

In these first few moments trying it out, I haven’t got very far, though. I tried searching for a particular author and got a list of her books, most of which had “Checked out” next them. I tried one that wasn’t and got options to buy from the usual suspects (Amazon, Abebooks and so on) or borrow it from a real-world library.

I like that library option, I like it very much: I expected that it would be some US-only service as Open Library is American but nope. Apparently my own local library, the Library of Birmingham here in the UK has a copy of the book I fancy.

So who needs or wants Kindle Unlimited? Do read Bustillos’ full article for more ranting and a little more detail.

Subscription reading not coming to Amazon UK yet

The US version of Amazon has today announced Kindle Unlimited: for about ten dollars a month, you become a subscriber. It says here that you can rent as many books as you like but people are already discovering that not all authors are available.

That will change and at some point presumably the Kindle Unlimited service will come to the UK. But until it does, take a look at a video on the Amazon US site that explains how it all works.