Amazon reviewers: just as reliable as professional critics

Here’s an interesting one: a study that suggests Amazon reviews are just as reliable as newpaper ones, for non-fiction at least. I agree entirely, although I reserve the right to edit this post if people start posting one-star jobs…

Although the study points out that there is “virtually no quality assurance” in Amazon’s consumer reviews, which can also be “gamed” by publishers or competitors submitting false reviews, they found that, nevertheless, experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.

Amazon reviewers were more likely to give a favourable review to a debut author, which the Harvard academics said suggested that “one drawback of expert reviews is that they may be slower to learn about new and unknown books”.

Professional critics were more positive about prizewinning authors, and “more favourable to authors who have garnered other attention in the press (as measured by number of media mentions outside of the review)”.

Music, books and other media: meet the new boss, worse than the old boss

Most of the debate over digital music business models is about the record companies and their digital successors, but what about the musicians? David Lowery of Cracker argues that for them, things are much worse: at least some pre-digital musicians actually got paid.

The full thing is long but worth your time:

 Things are worse.  This was not really what I was expecting.  I’d be very happy to be proved wrong.  I mean it’s hard for me to sing the praises of the major labels. I’ve been in legal disputes with two of the three remaining major labels.   But sadly I think I’m right.   And the reason is quite unexpected.  It’s seems the Bad Old Major Record Labels “accidentally” shared  too much  revenue and capital through their system of advances.  Also the labels  ”accidentally” assumed most of the risk.   This is contrasted with the new digital distribution system where some of the biggest players assume almost no risk and share zero capital.

I don’t agree with everything he writes, but that bit there makes sense to me – and it’s being replicated in ebooks. What looks like empowerment can also be evisceration: the Apples and Amazons of the world aren’t getting rid of middlemen, but becoming them by getting writers to do all the work (editing, promotion, etc) that traditional publishers do. They still get a cut, but they don’t have to risk any of their money.

In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates.  And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.

There’s a wider angle to this too, which I’m sure I’ll come back to in a proper post: the way in which the new titans are organised in such a way that they can destroy their foreign rivals without paying foreign taxes. By routing ebook sales and music downloads through Luxembourg and putting UK earnings through Irish subsidiaries – something that, as public companies, they arguably have to do; their responsibility is to maximise their share prices, not to be good corporate citizens – the new bosses get yet another advantage: not only are they largely free from the need to invest in content creation, but they’re freed from some of the main costs of doing business too.

Lowery:

Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry.  They do not value content.  They only see THEIR services as valuable.  They are the Masters of the Universe.  They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks.

As I say, I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s hard to argue against that one.

“Gun hats? What a brilliant idea!”

Another week, another faintly frightening bit of proposed state surveillance. Me, on Techradar:

What’s happening here is a classic bit of political manoeuvring. What’s supposed to happen is this: the security services ask for the power to do anything they like, plus some satellites with giant lasers and hats that can be used as guns, because that’s what the security services are supposed to do.

The government then tells the security services to get stuffed because we can’t afford gun hats, and because privacy is a fundamental human right.

Like Labour before them, the Tories have forgotten to do their bit. Instead of saying “get stuffed, you power-crazed doom-mongers!” they’ve said “Gun hats? What a brilliant idea!”

“If a few drunken tweets merit prison but harassment doesn’t, something’s going wrong here”

I’ve been thinking about Twitter racists and other unpleasantness. Techradar:

I’m no friend of racists, but the sentencing of Liam Stacyworries me. Stacy, as I’m sure you know, trolled Twitter users over Fabrice Muamba, posting vile racist crap when they responded, and as a result he’s been sentenced to two months in prison.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that what he did was acceptable – but two months in prison? For tweeting?

The point of the piece isn’t to justify what Stacy posted – it was vile – but to ask whether we’re throwing the book at the right people.  As I’ve said in the comments:

It’s an interesting area of law: how do you protect free speech (even if you loathe that speech with every fibre of your being) while cracking down on the harassers and scum like the people who troll the recently bereaved?

I don’t know what the answers are. Fines? Community service among the communities being abused? Electronic ASBOs and cyber-curfews banning them from social media?

“I used to think that the answer to piracy was to jail all taxi drivers.”

Me, piracy, PC Plus:

When I was young, a truck full of chocolate bars lost its load a few streets from my house. By the time the police turned up – which was, annoyingly, long before I found out about it – the cargo had gone. People didn’t take the chocolate because they were forced to; they took it because, hey! Free chocolate! The rewards were so attractive and the risk of being caught was so remote that half the town went on a three-day Wispa binge.

Can you trust Kindle reviews?

Someone I follow on Twitter posted this earlier (sorry, I can’t remember who it was): a big list of people offering to post reviews of Kindle books for money.

I don’t recall hiring this guy:

For only 5 bucks I will buy your .99 Kindle ebook, provide a 1 star rating and write a negative review that may demotivate customers from buying your book. This will allow you as the author to help further alienate potential readers by taking the unfounded criticism way too personally. I may also click the “Yes” helful button on other negative reviews of your book to dramatically decrease your books credibility, sales and exposure.

Gags aside, I wonder how much work people like this get:

I will review up to TWO different products. I will give a 5-star positive review for your kindle, book or whatever product you have on Amazon. We all know Amazon is the number one outlet for people buying books, CDs, kindles etc and it is vital that customers see favourable reviews. My reviews will be tailored to match your product and will have a “genuine” feel to it and not appear spammy, such “cool book” or “nifty product, go and buy one” etc

I wrote a column about this kind of thing, but it hasn’t made its way online yet: if it’s worthwhile to game a system, the system will be gamed.

I know it’s illegal for companies to pay for this kind of thing. Does anybody know whether EU anti-astroturfing laws apply to individuals?

Battle of the book bots

Thanks very much to Mike, who sent me this one: it’s a really weird story about battling book pricing bots.

with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

The internet has everything.

The economics of piracy

This is fascinating: Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy

Suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can’t see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that’s literally about the level of evidence we’re dealing with here.

The other side of SOPA and anti-piracy legislation

I like Michael Marshall, and his blog post about the other side of the piracy debate is worth your time. Not all anti-piracy sentiment comes from swivel-eyed loons or Disney.

The government is supposed to be on the side of laws, isn’t it? Copyright is a law too. If they don’t defend that law in the new kind of social space that the internet represents, where will the laxity end? What other laws will be let slide on the grounds that they might impede the rights of Internet users to do what the heck they feel like? What about your right to privacy? You care a lot about that one, don’t you? What makes it so desperately important for the government to defend your rights there, but not defend others’ rights to be paid for their intellectual property?

“Long-term there’s no future in printed books”

An interesting post on the appallingly named tech site Pandodaily: Confessions of a publisher, written by an unnamed “industry insider”.

Amazon could probably afford to lose $20 million/year in their publishing arm just to put the other publishers out of business. I think that’s what they’re trying to do–throw money around in an industry that doesn’t have any, until Amazon becomes not only the only place where you buy books, but the only place that publishes books, too.