Why are the studios going to be inclined to listen, especially since overwhelmingly, those negative reviews were people had not actually seen the product?

NO – the author, creator, whatever – has NO SAY IN ANYTHING in regards to publishing.

We don’t control DRM. We can’t control if it is e-book published. We can do NOTHING.

I am not saying don’t mention those extras – i.e. if a CD has some sort of DRM on it so that it can’t be copied to your computer. That is a useful thing to know. However, people think we ‘Talent’ have a lot more control than we do. Unless you are Stephen King or Nora Roberts, they could give a figgity fig what the creator wants.

“…I wouldn’t criticize a movie based on the theater I saw it in (unless it was Avatar), but these aren’t called content reviews, they’re called PRODUCT reviews. It’s perfectly reasonable to judge the entire package — I haven’t bought a new-release movie on DVD since 2005, because I got sick of seeing Special Editions released a year after the initial barebones DVD release…”

Good point. Also, if Amazon.com reviews were supposed to be for the content instead of the product, then what about reviews for all the non-media products sold there too? How would a “review the content, not the product” custom apply to, say, the Eureka 313A Enviro Hard-Surface Floor Steamer?

Ha! Yes, very stupid, and very unwilling to make anything their fault. Well, I’m being unfair (kinda); they’re mostly just slow. Slow to react and slow to change. And they’re more interested in the raw numbers than what people are saying. Quantifying saves so much time, even if it elides important things.

The particular example used in the TechCrunch post, though, is probably not the right test case if people want to use downrating to force a publisher’s hand. Thirty seconds shows that all of Michael Lewis’s other books are in Kindle format already, all except this very newest one. There’s no reason to believe this one will be any different, just because it’s not out _yet_. And why would it be? The paperback doesn’t come out at the same time as the hardcover. The DVD doesn’t coincide with the theatrical run. The day might come when e-formats are the dominant publishing choice, but currently, they’re still a niche market. The fact that people might have to wait a bit for said format’s release should be neither a surprise nor a crisis.

I know I am not planning to buy Avatar because their excuse for not having any special features holds no water. How hard is it to include a second disc. None of my multi-disc blu-rays (with special features on a second blu-ray disc) were any costlier than a single disc.

Jessica, I didn’t take it as meaning me, but thank you for clearing that up. It sounds as though there’s really no way to accomplish what customers want to accomplish, since you’re saying that publishers are too stupid to read the actual comments. :) I mean, if people are saying “I am giving this one star because I want an ebook version and the publisher won’t give me one” and the publisher thinks “oh, it got one star because of the author”, they’re just demonstrating ignorance.

James, good point. I think, in this case, the authors think the ratings matter, because many of them are the ones getting upset. They don’t like being used as pawns in a battle between consumer and publisher, and I can’t blame them for that. And yes, people lose interest and quit paying attention quickly. I heard lots of things about that video game rate-down when it first happened. I’m sure it’s been done on other games since then, but at that point, it’s not news anymore.

I love Johanna’s site and she’s pointed me towards many a wonderful item over the years. Yet I can’t think of a single instance where something negative she said kept me from getting something I’d planned on.

One thing anyone’s seen online who has been online long enough, is that any area seems to take on a certain mentality. Most of which are negative comments, because people who are happy with something rarely feel the need to be heard.

I’m reading those comments or as they call it reviews. To me that mob or hive mentality that seems to be coming through works more against than for them. They are obviously there because they have an agenda (I don’t want to buy anything but DVDs/I want all books to be ebooks!)

Which are valid viewpoints to have, but once you state it, then it becomes easier to tune out when you oftenly repeat it after wards.

(Also, the “little missy” in my previous comment was meant to be my publisher talking to me, not me talking to you. I didn’t catch the ambiguity the first time. Curse of rush-commenting!)

While I don’t like the attitudes which accompany many of the reviews, I do value those reviews which inform me of the positive and negative aspects of whatever item I’m considering purchasing.

These examples above are not at all the same as the example that TechCrunch highlights.

Giving a DVD a lower mark due to soundtrack changes is entirely legitimate, especially if the music that has been changed is music that could be considered integral to the show (I say show as it’s almost always TV that suffers soundtrack changes, not film). An example would be the UK TV show ‘Skins’, each episode of which features a large amount of music, prominently played, that cleverly worked well with each scene. Changing the music for the DVD release had an effect on the whole product, and many people (myself included) didn’t buy it as a result.

Giving a lower mark for missing special features is borderline, but I’d allow it. Maybe not one-starring the review, but certainly the reviewer should be allowed to knock at least one star off, maybe two. Especially if it’s the case that the DVD has unused space on it which *could* have the special features on it, as this would reinforce the view that special features are being left off to force people to upgrade to Blu-Ray. Similarly, I myself would have little hesistation giving one-star reviews to DVDs that lack subtitles. The point here is that Amazon reviews are reviewing the whole PRODUCT, not just the tiny part that is the story, and if any part of the product could be deemed defective, that’s a legitimate area to mark it down it.

The same applies to the videogame DRM issue. If you can’t play a game unless you’re on the internet, or if a game secretly installs software on your computer to administer the DRM used in the game, then that’s a legitimate reason to mark down the game. It could be the best game since sliced bread, but when the container is a spiky chalice of pain and poison, that doesn’t matter.

All those examples, as I say, are different to the TechCrunch article, where a BOOK is being badly ‘reviewed’ because there is no E-BOOK version. That would be like a DVD getting bad reviews because there’s no Blu-Ray, or a video-game – say, Heavy Rain – getting bad reviews because there’s no X-Box or Wii version. Those are all factors which have no connection whatsoever to the product under review, and in those cases I think Amazon really should be removing them. By the same token, I hate seeing five-star reviews on unreleased DVDs saying “This is the best film ever and I can’t wait to buy it, like you all should!” because they tell me nothing about the product, and I’d love to see those removed from Amazon too.

“Can’t an author, in at least some cases, draft a contract that requires ebook releases?”

Absolutely not, no publisher would allow it. Unless, possibly, the author was a mega-selling powerhouse like Stephenie Meyer, or James Patterson, in which case they wouldn’t need to include such a clause anyway. But 99.9999999999% of authors have absolutely no leverage to enforce such a clause. Bluntly put, it’s not their job to decide what the best format to release a book in is, anyway. The publisher is the one placed to know this stuff. If they think they can make money with an ebook, they will. If they think a ebook will *cost* them money and so they hold it back until paperback release, then that’s their choice too. But they’d no more let an author have a clause *forcing* an ebook release than they’d let an author having a clause forcing them to release deluxe-sized illustrated editions with leather covers, gold edges, and a personalised dedication in each one (in a limited run of 237 copies).

In some cases, if the DRM were as reported, giving a game one star for the DRM would be like giving an appliance that damaged your home because they were poorly built.

Not usually. I mean, I’m sure Jodi Picoult or James Patterson can get publishers to play ball, but for most of us, not so much. I sure can’t. These are tough times, little missy, and they’ll publish in the format they want and I’ll like it. So while I can agree with giving a game that doesn’t work because of its DRM protection a bad review, since that’s an issue with that product, I can’t get behind rating down a book because it’s not in the format you want when you want it. It’s not the publisher that suffers most from that; it’s the midlister whose book stops selling and whose contract gets dropped. You want the publisher to hear you, talk to them.