Besides, reviews are extremely subjective….some love books for the prose and the literary style, others hate first person, others want PC all the way, some want a good story and will excuse everything else if that’s solid.

In the end, it’s good to know Amazon is at least trying to make things more fair. For me, the best reviews are still those that I get from like minded friends and readers. One woman’s trash is often another’s treasure.

The big question is – will she continue? This may depend on whether publishers continue feeding her with books. Only time will tell. I guess that reviews will continue to appear for a while because of already agreed commitments, so it may be a while before we know the answer.

1) Voting circles. I know that somebody (not me) sent Amazon evidence (earlier this year) that one reviewer was circulating e-mails telling people about his reviews, asking for votes and offering votes in return. Given that it takes a few months for a change of this nature to be designed, coded, tested and installed, I think that evidence may have been the trigger for these changes, although the “Dear Author” thread debating possible changes to Amazon’s software may also have played some part, along with any number of other complaints received from elsewhere. The new system makes it hard for voting circles to be effective, insofar as they have any effect at all.

2) Quantity for the sake of it. HK was the obvious example, but Amazon must have realized that quantity for its own sake wasn’t good for business. Hopefully, the new system does more to encourage quality rather than quantity. That said, prolific reviewers appear to still be rewarded to some extent even in the new system.

3) Inactive reviewers. The old system accumulated ranking points in perpetuity, something I’ve complained about for years. This means that people who quit or die at a high rank will retain a high rank for years afterwards, dropping only slowly down the rankings. This issue could have been addressed by tweaking the old algorithm to ignore very old votes, but that wouldn’t have solved the other two problems.

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In creating their new system, Amazon have taken steps to make it difficult for statisticians to work out how the new system works. You used to be able to click on your ranking (or anybody else’s) and see that part of the ranking table. Statisticians used the bottom end of the table to work out the old system with a fair degree of accuracy. In the new system, only the top 10,000 ranks are clickable. It will therefore be difficult to reverse-engineer the new system, but maybe not impossible. We’ll see.

It is worth noting that, for now, the old and new ranking systems co-exist. I think that, apart from anything else, it’s a recipe for confusion. I expect that Amazon will eventually drop the old system but they haven’t said they’ll do that.

As for myself, I’ve gone up a little under the new system, but when it gets rolled out to Amazon’s other websites, I expect to be hit hard. In my own country, I expect (based on the general pattern of what’s happened in America) to drop out of the top 100. Even if I don’t go that low, it’s a foregone conclusion that my ranking will drop. I don’t mind because I always thought the old system was garbage.

On the positive reviews, I understand not finishing books you don’t like, but how come all the books she does review get either 5 or 4 stars, no matter how wildly different the writing and execution? It would seem, then, that she either loves or loathes what she reads–and that is useless to other readers in and of itself.

Plus her reviews contain no substance. Most often it’s the regrgitated blurb plus spoilers plus “and it’s great” (or variation thereof)