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Sunday, May 14, 2000 By Michael Newman
Poor Fred Emerson Brooks.
Not only was his work plucked from obscurity for the anthology "Very Bad Poetry," which includes his masterpiece "The Stuttering Lover." But he also must suffer the exacting indignity of Amazon.com, where "Very Bad Poetry" is ranked 73,622 on Amazon's "bestseller" list.
Michael Newman can be reached at m.newman@yale.edu.
I suppose the author of No. 73,623 feels even worse. Then again, authors have been known to purchase their own books -- sometimes all it takes is half a dozen copies -- to jump a few thousand notches toward the top. Maybe not all the way to No. 1, but still. As John F. Kennedy's father told him before the 1960 West Virginia primary: "Don't buy one vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'll pay for a landslide."
But Amazon is not content merely to compute a sales ranking for every single book it sells, and to recalibrate those rankings on an hourly basis. Everything has a ranking on Amazon. Readers rate books. Listeners rate music. Parents rate toys. And then, in a stroke of genius, customers rank the reviewers. I'm waiting for Amazon to create a way for me to rate the ranking of the reviewers.
Feeding our primal need to rate is just one of the benefits of technology. It also makes it possible to create minor celebrities, since top reviewers also get their own page on Amazon. And, perhaps best of all, at least if you happen to be in the business of selling books: All the reviews are positive!
Well, not quite. According to my rigorous analysis, the average review of the top 10 reviewers on Amazon is 4.43 stars out of a possible five. (For the raw data, I tabulated the 10 most recent reviews of each of the top 10 reviewers. Of 500 possible stars, they awarded 443.)
Some of the reviews are, admittedly, pretty good. The woman tied for the 10th spot, for instance, achieves double celebrity by being a top 10 reviewer and just happening to be the granddaughter of a famous French Impressionist painter. Her generally sunny disposition is spoiled only by a two-star review for "Martha Stewart's Pies and Tarts" ("I've tasted kindergarten paste that had more flavor than these recipes").
More typical is the No. 3 reviewer, who awards 49 out of a possible 50 stars for his 10 most recent books -- all of which are certification-test study guides for computer technicians. At last, this underappreciated genre has found a champion. And that champion has found Amazon.
Amazon attracts reviewers the way Bill Gates attracts lawsuits. The No. 1 reviewer has posted no fewer than 449 reviews, mostly of mysteries. The second guy has posted 306. No. 7 has posted 293, including five one busy day last June. These are people, to use the most benevolent phrase, with a lot of time on their hands.
Amazon also ballyhoos its reviews, and its review of its reviews, as democracy in action. "The ballots are in," the site notes. "The votes have been counted. Let's hear it for our top reviewers." (Customers "vote" by clicking "Yes" or "No" to the question, "Was this review helpful to you?")
Thus is the retired librarian from rural Pennsylvania on equal footing with the literary critic from Manhattan, N.Y. But what happens when the reviews aren't necessarily positive? Ask the reviewers of Bil Keane's "The Family Circus," whose subversive and hilarious reviews of those comic-strip books are regularly purged from the site.
Of course, a business designed to sell books cannot be expected to give voice to those who advise against buying them. Democracy has its limits, after all.
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