What if you just removed the stars and only had text? Makes buying based on "reviews" harder...
Could also do something like upvotes but then that just ends up with the same problems as stars.
Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
271–273 of 273 posts
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#272I find that even books are plagued with this issue. Some obscure technical books selling for more than 80$ will come in a very poor quality print, like they had been printed from a scan. Clearly the book has ran out of original prints, and somewhere they print it cheaply just to make the sell.
Actually these books are likely counterfeit, being produced overseas and sold on Amazon as the real deal. It's easy because neither the publisher nor Amazon (nor the customer for that matter) can know that someone listing a product is shipping a fraud.
What would be the right way to check that? Perhaps sending a mail to the publisher?
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually these books are likely counterfeit, being produced overseas and sold on Amazon as the real deal. It's easy because neither the publisher nor Amazon (nor the customer for that matter) can know that someone listing a product is shipping a fraud.
What would be the right way to check that? Perhaps sending a mail to the publisher?
That sounds reasonable, sure. You might also try contacting the author directly. Authors tend to know way more about their books than the person answering your email at the publisher, and certainly would have a good idea what their print editions are supposed to look like. I've actually found emailing book authors about their books in niche fields to be usually really easy and interesting in its own right.