Sept. 5: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds up a book titled “Stronger Together” as she speaks at the 11th Congressional District Labor Day festival at Luke Easter Park in Cleveland, Ohio.
(AP)
Hillary Clinton's newest book, "Stronger Together," has been met with critical reviews and slow sales since its release earlier this month.
But Amazon.com appears to be helping the Democratic presidential nominee by removing negative reviews from its website, WND.com reported.
The book, co-authored by Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine, sold just 2,912 copies in its first week on sale, according to Nielsen BookScan. And the online ratings have been abysmal, with 81 percent one-star ratings and an average of only 1.7 on Amazon.com after it hit book shelves on Sept 6.
Amazon, however, has tried to fix that.
According to WND.com -- which has been tracking the number of reviews -- Amazon deleted hundreds of comments last week that were critical of the book, which lays out a policy blueprint of how the country would look under a Clinton-Kaine administration.
On Thursday, Amazon -- whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post -- said there were 91 positive reviews compared to 166 critical ones, according to WND. Just two days earlier, there were 1,244 reviews -- 81 percent of them with one-star and 16 percent with five-star ratings, the website reported.
As of Monday morning, 85 percent of the customer reviews on Amazon gave it one star, while only 11 percent gave it five stars.
The book dropped from No. 840 on Amazon's best-seller rankings early last week to No. 1,538 on Thursday.
One reader, identified as Robert S Lionel JR, gave the book a one-star rating and wrote, "Every time I write my review it gets deleted, it's so weird. Does anyone know where the servers are hosted that contain reviews?"
Another reader commented: "I expected that Amazon tweaked reviews but have lost all belief in Amazon reviews now. Will switch to Walmart for ordering most the things I used to buy here."
According to Amazon's description, the book "presents [their] agenda in full, relating stories from the American people and outlining the Clinton/Kaine campaign's plans on everything from apprenticeships to the Zika virus."
Many of the poor reviews appeared to hit the candidate rather than the substance of the book. Of the comments that critiqued the book, readers used words such as "boring" and "dishonest" in describing the 250-page text interspersed with bullet-point policy ideas.