Agylen

Steve Loughran: “But wait a minute, check out those reviews. Every single one of the 5* reviewers calls it ‘ANT’, not ‘ant’, and is so full of unqualified praise you’d think this is the best contribution to Java literature ever. Yet these people have never reviewed anything else, except for some who do nothing but praise a single publisher, or cross-link to it.”

Thankfully, Amazon has put in place some methods for countering this type of behavior. If you see a “Report this” link beneath an obviously fake review, click on it and, assuming you have an account at Amazon.com, a report asking to take down the review as inappropriate will be sent to them. I guess that if enough people do this, we’ll soon see those reviews disappear.

It’s sad that a publisher like Virtualbookworm is engaging in these slimy tactics. Well, I guess they went a little too far in committing to the mission statement that is written on their homepage:

This means we are truly dedicated to the success of our authors!

Update: The saga continues. Far from being ashamed of their own behavior, those slimeballs are reaching new lows like copying the single honest and negative review they got and pasting it as if it were a review of every other Ant book on Amazon, as can be demonstrated here. Fucking spammers!

Update [Aug. 14]: Looks like Amazon took care of this, as all fake reviews (together with the only true one, unfortunately) on all books by A.T. Bell have been removed. I had also emailed Virtualbookwork.com about this and they were kind in replying promptly that is not their policy to post fake reviews and they would have investigated whether it was one of the authors. I’ll give them the benefit of doubt, even though there are other suspicious cases on Amazon yet, like books having seven or eight 5-star reviews by anonymous reviewers.