Reviewing the reviewers

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Last June, at Book Expo America, an audience member at a panel on book criticism raised the question of Amazon.com’s customer reviews. The panel participants (myself among them) responded by talking generally about the differences between consumer comments and serious criticism. What none of us wanted to say, though, was that we’d never given these reviews much thought because they so often seem devoid of critical judgment, let alone any real substance.

Now, a piece in Slate by Garth Risk Hallberg engages the issue of Amazon customer reviews with an acuity that gets at the heart of our--or, at least, my--discomfort. According to Hallberg, such reviews were originally intended as ‘a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: ‘an intelligent and articulate conversation ... conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits,’ as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote.’

The truth, however, is somewhat different, as the publishing industry (and other commercial interests) have found ways to co-opt the process, wooing Amazon’s favorite reviewers with free books and come-ons.

‘This fall,’ Hallberg writes, ‘when it invited select Top Reviewers to join its Vine program--an initiative, still in beta-testing, to generate content about new and prerelease products--Amazon extended the range of perks. ‘Vine Voices’ ... can elect to receive items ranging from electronics to appliances to laundry soap. As long as they keep reviewing the products, Amazon’s suppliers will keep sending them.’

There’s a word for that kind of practice, although we don’t need to go into it here. More distressing is the pressure this puts on Amazon’s ‘Top Reviewers’ to keep their status by writing more and more reviews. Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s longtime No. 1 reviewer, has cranked out, on average, 45 book reviews a week over the last five years. That’s six-and-a-half books a day, for anyone who’s keeping count. Even were such a thing possible, how much thinking goes into these reviews?

This is the question at the heart of Hallberg’s fascinating analysis and its unsettling conclusion that ‘the Top Amazon Reviewer heralds the arrival of a curious hybrid: part customer, part employee.’

David L. Ulin