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.
#1: Tooconservative To: Deckard (#0)
If people are just showing up out of the blue and trolling this silly book, Amazon has a right to remove those reviews if they believe that the reviewer has not read the book. Amazon is, after all, trying to give fair reviews and to sell books so they get their cut.
Amazon may also have ordered truckloads of them and don't want to see them sitting in the warehouse.
Tooconservative posted on 2017-09-13 12:17:16 Reply Private Reply
#2: rlk To: Tooconservative (#1)
That's Amazon's mistake. Correct it by selling them for a penny a piece with free mailing to be used as firewood.
rlk posted on 2017-09-13 13:29:11 Reply Private Reply
#3: Tooconservative To: rlk (#2)
Bezos didn't make $80B by thinking like that.
Why should anyone expect Amazon to behave any differently from any other big merchant with vested market interests and possibly a big stake already invested in these (nothingburger) books?
Gee, it's acting like a business. It's just too shocking!
Tooconservative posted on 2017-09-13 15:08:45 Reply Private Reply
#4: Tooconservative To: Deckard, rlk, All (#0)
Amazon ‘deletes 900 FAKE reviews’ of Hillary Clinton’s book
The book, What Happened, went on sale on Tuesday and within 24 hours there were around 1,600 reviews - many of them critical.Quartz analysed the data and discovered only 338 of the posts were from users with verified purchases of the item - those who actually bought the book from Amazon.com.
It is possible the other users bought the book elsewhere and then logged on to the site to post a review, but on Amazon the vast majority of reviews are from people who bought the book on the site.
Quartz report says as of 4.40pm BST the former secretary of state’s book had 1,669 reviews; 50 percent one star, and 45 per cent five star. The average rating was 3.2.
After the reviews were deleted the average rating rose to 4.3 stars.
Amazon refused to confirm that they had deleted any reviews, but by Wednesday evening only 460 reviews remained on the site, and they all were “verified” purchases.
Jonathan Karp, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, told The Telegraph he believed many of the reviews were from people who hadn’t read the book.
He said: “It seems highly unlikely that approximately 1,500 people read Hillary Clinton’s book overnight and came to the stark conclusion that it is either brilliant or awful.”
Currently the book has 574 reviews, 95 per cent are 5 stars and 3 per cent are 1 star.
So it isn't clear that Amazon is trying to prop up Hitlery's sad book. I've seen them do this before; a lot of reviews are pretty trollish or come from staffers for rival publishers, trying to drive each others' ratings down. Entire companies do this for pay at Amazon and other venues.
Tooconservative posted on 2017-09-14 14:07:31 Reply Private Reply
#5: rlk To: Tooconservative (#4)
rlk posted on 2017-09-14 18:31:27 Reply Private Reply
#6: nolu chan To: Deckard (#0)
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nolu chan posted on 2017-09-14 18:57:26 Reply Private Reply
#7: Tooconservative To: nolu chan (#6)
Tooconservative posted on 2017-09-14 19:06:02 Reply Private Reply
#8: nolu chan To: Tooconservative (#7)
nolu chan posted on 2017-09-14 20:24:34 Reply Private Reply
#9: Tooconservative To: nolu chan (#8)
Tooconservative posted on 2017-09-14 20:30:54 Reply Private Reply