Book sales and Amazon reviews

According to recent surveys, online shoppers love to read reviews.

In 2007 a PowerReviews/e-tailing group survey ¹ found that 68% of online shoppers read at least four product reviews before purchasing. Only 2% of online shoppers claimed not to read reviews.

Two other 2007 surveys emphasize the importance of user reviews. Forrester Research ² found that online shoppers want to see user ratings and reviews more than they want special offers or coupons, videos, personalization, or games. Avenue A|Razorfish ³ found that more online shoppers used user reviews than used comparison charts or expert reviews.

Do reviews affect book sales?

In terms of total book sales, reviews may increase sales to infrequent readers, but probably not to bookworms like me. My book purchases are a relatively fixed volume: I buy as many as I can read.

Do reviews shift which sites I buy from? Not much. I read newspaper and blog reviews, so I'm as likely to research books in an RSS newsreader as on a bookseller's site. I imagine many shoppers like to research and purchase all at one site, but the Avenue A|Razorfish study showed a growing population using RSS feeds, so I'm probably not alone.

So how much do user reviews shift purchases from book to book?

In 2003-04 Chevalier and Mayzlin ⁴ studied Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, focusing on whether specific books' sales were affected by:

• The availability or lack of reviews
  
• Whether the reviews were positive or negative.

Chevalier and Mayzlin compared book-by-book sales data from Amazon and B&N to test several arguments against hosting user reviews. The analysis is a little out of date as Amazon’s review system keeps changing; I’ll interpose some links and thoughts along with their findings.

1. Motivation: Why review for free?

Or, as Steven Levitt of Freakonomics puts it: What motivates the 1,000th reviewer to contribute? Hasn’t everything already been said?

That depends on what the reviewer stands to benefit. Many Amazon reviews are probably written simply as an outlet to gush or rant over a book. I enjoy thinking critically about books, and discussing books with others. In 2003, reviewer Francis McInerney’s goal was to be mentioned in acknowledgments or quoted on a book jacket.

In terms of sales, even that 1,000th review may have some effect. Chevalier and Mayzlin found that over time,

an increase in the number of reviews at Amazon.com relative to bn.com continues to improve sales at Amazon.com relative to bn.com.

In other words, Amazon's approach pays off. Once an active reviewing community is established, those reviewers' interests can drive sales to the public at large. (It's interesting that this effect was documented on Amazon, where the review community can be highly competitive. It may be that a contentious atmosphere within the review community is not visible or important to non-reviewing book-buyers.)

2. Free-riding: Research here, buy there

I admit, I research books on Amazon far more often than I buy from Amazon. I would guess that free-riding happens mostly in that direction: most users know to go to Amazon for reviews, but fewer would leave Amazon for B&N reviews. After all, Chevalier and Mayzlin show that most books have fewer reviews on BN.com than on Amazon and "BN.com’s total sales equal about 15% of Amazon.com’s North American sales" ⁴.

On the other hand, I'm not sure free-riding should be a disincentive to host reviews. Sure, I sometimes read Amazon reviews but purchase elsewhere. But that means Amazon's reviews have lured me away from another site for at least part of the buying process.

Because of free-riding, Chevalier and Mayzlin's analysis

potentially greatly under-estimates the effect of word of mouth on sales…. Barnes & Noble.com customers could read Amazon reviews, or, similarly, Amazon reviews could affect offline sales. In fact, the success of a recently released best-seller “DaVinci Code” was attributed partly to an endorsement by... Francis McInerney.

That's right: a lone reviewer like Harriet Klausner can be influential in book sales.

3. Five-star (in)credibility

Chevalier and Mayzlin speculated that authors probably review their own books, so positive reviews wouldn't be as credible. This issue hit the news in 2004 (during Chevalier and Mayzlin’s study), when Amazon.ca briefly outed a number of authors who had given rave reviews to their own works and one-star reviews to rivals.

Since then Amazon has instituted Real Names, refined reviewers' “reputations”, and built up the Amazon "community" in hopes that it would self-police. These remedies have cut down on proliferating identities and self-reviewing, but of course abuses are impossible to prevent. In 2006 an Amazon UK Marketplace shop bribed a customer to change his review. The current flap involves an author berating and google-stalking reviewers.

Not all review trickery is driven by sales. Some Amazon users are motivated by Top 100 Reviewer status. Positive reviews are more often tagged as “Helpful”, which in turn increases the reviewer’s status in the Amazon community.

Can reviewers conspire to drive sales? As far as I know, I rarely run across coordinated campaigns of positive reviews on Amazon--though when I do, they're usually pretty obvious. However, author (or fan) trickery isn't the only reason to be leery of positive reviews. Many five-star reviews simply gush; there's often more information in mixed reviews. Chevalier and Mayzlin's analysis confirms that perception to some extent; they found that three-star reviews were, on average, longer than one- and five-star reviews.

At the same time I wonder if consumers tend to discount both positive and negative reviews. There's a large number of crank and bogus reviews on Amazon along with the five-star reviews.

4. Negative reviews may depress sales

It surprises me that consumers expect Amazon to act as an unbiased review site. On a website without user reviews, cherry-picking reviews would be business as usual. I don't really suspect Amazon of gross chicanery; it's not in the company's interests to deceive customers. Nonetheless, it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon removed negative reviews more readily than positive reviews.

Chevalier and Mayzlin provide some additional motivation for that idea. They found that one-star reviews (which are relatively rare) have more effect on sales than do five-star reviews. They piggyback this onto the credibility problem:

Although the author can post a large number of meaningless five-star reviews cheaply, he or she cannot prevent others from posting one-star reviews.

Mayzlin reiterated this finding in a February '08 NPR story, but didn’t mention an important wrinkle: their data were collected back before the Real Name program cut down on users with many accounts, and when Amazon displayed the most recent review first. It’s hard to say what these findings mean now that Amazon allows the user to sort reviews by star ratings.

Furthermore, Chevalier and Mayzlin's main analysis was of uncensored reviews. When they analyzed a smaller set of books for which Amazon had “pruned” the reviews, they found that new one-star reviews had no more effect than new five-star reviews. Was that "pruning" the same process that Amazon follows today?

On a positive note, Chevalier and Mayzlin also found that:

• Reviews are generally positive (more so at BN.com than Amazon.com)
  
• Consumers don’t just rely on a product’s average number of stars, but actually read the text of each other’s reviews

References

¹ PowerReviews/the e-tailing group. Social Shopping Study 2007. Nov. 2007.
1,200 people spending at least $500 per year in at least four online transactions.

² Forrester Research, North American Technographics Customer Experience, Marketing and Consumer Technology Online Survey. Q3, 2007.
A non-random survey of 5,366 US and Canadian consumers. Includes purchases of consumer electronics, travel and banking sites. Partial summary in Online Media Daily, Feb. 2008.

³ Avenue A | Razorfish. Digital Consumer Behavior Study. July 2007.
Only 475 respondents from a pretty high-tech group: 60% of respondents write or comment on blogs regularly.

⁴ Judith A. Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin. The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews. Yale School of Management Working Paper No's. ES-28 & MK-15 . First published online via SSRN, 2003. Final publication in Journal of Marketing Research 43(8): 345-354.

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Rip it/Rip it real good

As seen on the NY Times' Papercuts... an apparent fetish video of a woman ripping books to shreds.


The Youtube contributor's description:

Katrin destroys a variety of books, boxes, phone directories, diaries, and catalogs demolishing them quickly into small fragments with a variety of ripping techniques, stomping the pieces into the bin with her high heels.

The NY Times' Dwight Garner asks:

Is there an undiscovered community of book-ripping fetishists out there? Are there secret clubs one can get into? Pay-per-view channels? A blog?

Whew.

Down, boy. I know this makes your reviewer's heart beat faster, but she really spreads her shred around. She also destroys such lusty items as computer monitors and shoeboxes. In fact her Youtube channel is devoted to Tearing, Ripping, and destruction by Girls and Boys.

By the way, that video was made by two women. Does that make it hotter? One woman performing for another, in boots, with books?

And is this a new, Generation C, inversion of the familiar fetish for printed matter?

Or is the appeal the sheer joy of destruction? I think not. Judging by the Youtube viewings of Blendtec's "Will it Blend" videos, what's really hot is not simply destruction but the destruction of fetishized consumer objects like the iPhone. It's true, I'm not interested in Katrin shredding account books; it's the "real" books that caught my attention. (If I were an accountant, my fetish might lean in a different direction.)

UPDATE: A Papercuts reader posted an alternate reviewing method:

On his monthly book program “Druckfrisch,” translation, “Hot off the Press,” on Germany’s ARD Channel, critic Denis Scheck takes on the current bestseller list, by standing in a book warehouse, poised between a table and a roller belt that leads to a trash bin. If he likes a book, he places it gently on the table. If he doesn’t, he throws it down the roller belt, but not before skewering the offending material with rapier wit.

Tags: books, reviewing, shred, video

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Print reviews vs litblogs: Wake me when it's over

• On Amazon
• University of Missouri Press, 2007

The fight continues between print book reviewers and litbloggers. It gets old fast, so I won't try to write anything rigorous. Here's what I want, as a reader, from reviews--and a snapshot of where I currently find it, for what I currently read.

I want substantive, thoughtful reviews.

• Found in: Both newspapers and blogs.

I want reviews that have a larger perspective on the genre, the history, the authors, reading in general.

• Can happen in both. Largest perspective: More often in print. Largeish and genre perspective: both blogs and print.

In fiction, I want minimal plot summary and more focus on analysis.

• Found in: newspapers pretty consistently and blogs varyingly--sometimes more than print, sometimes less.
  
• Plot summary is the one thing Amazon's really good at.

I want diversity of opinion.

• Both newspapers and blogs, in different ways.
  
• Amazon has become more usable in this regard. Since I can now skip to the negative reviews, I can see whether the worst anyone came up with is "I found it unrealistic that the hero's name was Tom" or "There are 14 typos on page 1, and the preface is a gripe about women drivers."

I want online, searchable reviews that don't become "Premium Content" after a week (I'm looking at you, LA Times).

• Both, but some print sources hoard content, so give the edge to blogs.

I want diversity in the kinds of books that are reviewed.

• Can't have that without the blogs. There just aren't enough print reviewers to cover it all.

I want it to be easy to find.

• Um... newspapers because there are so many blogs? Or blogs because not all print reviews are online? (I'm a victim of data smog.)

I want reviews of books I won't read, but want to know about.

• Both. Newspapers score a bit higher on my "I should know about that" meter.

And, last but not at all least:

I want reviews that make me frantic to read the book.

• Gulp.... Mostly in newspapers.

That's a little surprising because so many book enthusiasts have blogs. Surely that should be the perfect source. In fact, I have a couple hundred book blogs in my news reader, and (with exceptions) their book posts mostly fall into three categories:

1. Personal journal style, i.e. more about the reviewer and the reviewer's response than about the books,
   
2. Brief mentions that make me say "Maybe...?" but don't convince me it's worth looking up, and
   
3. Academic-style literary criticism.

I find a lot of interesting reflections on books in the blogosphere. But finding books I want to read myself takes more work. The personal-recommendation style of book blogging just doesn't seem to give me the right cues. So newspapers are still where I most often find the kind of reviews--not personal recommendations, not critiques--that help me decide whether to read a book.

Upshot, currently: I use both print and blogs, often for slightly different purposes. But for me the balance of usefulness still leans toward print--all because of the type of review I'm used to seeing there. (Online "print", really--sort of a hybrid.) Some of that may be due to my blog reading habits; more of it's about my review reading habits and the way I use others' writings to pre-judge books.

All of the above are subject to change if another newspaper creates an RSS feed for its book section, or if I find another blog I love. There's so much out there.

Here's my roundup of recent opinions on the issue. What a wordy mcwordy bunch.

I agree!

Cynthia Ozick argues in Harper's (April 2007) that apart from a flurry of reviews, there's little critical follow-up on books:

What is missing is an undercurrent, or call it, rather (because so much rests on it), an infrastructure, of serious criticism.

Sven Birkerts defends his turf in The Boston Globe (29 July 2007):

So far it's clear that the blogosphere is in vital ways still predatory on print, that the daisy-chain needs the pretext of some original daisy; its genius, its essence, is manifestly supplementary. This recognition gives some credence to the many who argue for coexistence, a meshing of print culture and digital, with the latter very much spawning from the former.

No argument there. A lot of blogging is inspired by, or effectively a distribution service for, writing coming from the print media.

Douglas McLennan, editor of ArtsJournal.com, is quoted in the American Journalism Review (6/7 2007):

"[Internet journalism] ought to have been the terrain of traditional media companies. They totally mismanaged and squandered these opportunities online. But I don't believe the sky is falling... I feel like we're standing on the verge of a golden age of criticism. At times of the greatest change in a culture, that's when critics have their biggest role to play."

Daniel Green (The Reading Experience) says:

the existence of literary criticism is a necessary condition of the survival of both fiction and poetry. Without thoughtful discussion of what's being done by interesting writers, as well as continued discussion of what's been done in the past, "novels" as a form of "literature" will descend into further irrelevance. With no one to argue over what makes writing "literary" in the first place, or why such a concept even matters, novels will at best be only the first step in developing the script for the possible movie so many novels already want to be.

Scott Esposito, editor of the online Quarterly Conversation and member of the National Book Critics Circle, comments on the Ozick article:

in Ozick's view... [the ideal critic] engages not just a single book, but sees literature as a whole, understands relationships on many levels (e.g. between authors, between structure and language, between nations, between literature and other arts)....

Enough with the mad rush of literature.... Why not linger... say something about them that will last past the end of the year? With any luck, this slower, more contemplative critical approach to literature would foster a "cultural infrastructure" that "stimulates a literary consciousness"

Sven Birkerts of the Boston Globe again:

To have a sense of where we stand, and to hold not just a number of ideas in common, but also some shared way of presenting those ideas, we continue to need, among many others, The New York Times, the Globe, the Tribune, the LA Times, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The sheer reach of these papers strongly supports that argument. In contrast to the tailored and discretized environment of blogs.

I disagree!

Sven Birkerts of the Boston Globe again:

The blogosphere's boosters pitch its virtues of variety, grass-roots initiative, linkage, and freedom from perceived marketing influence.... I'm hard put to repudiate these virtues of the blogosphere. But can it really compensate for losses in the more clearly bounded print sector? ... as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet.

The fact that some litbloggers are also print reviewers somewhat contradicts this statement. A blog is what the blogger makes of it.

Ranting Ed Champion:
Comes out gnashing his teeth against the NYT PaperCuts blog out of... territoriality? "You nasty newspapers stay off my internet?" Sure smells like that's what's going on.

... and again, responding to the Birkerts article:

The literary life. A codeword for whether or not the literary print journalist makes a modest living or is able to maintain a sideline. To my mind, “literary life” is more of a semantic powder keg. The print journalist may depend on freelancing paychecks in part for a "literary life" rooted more in paying the rent; the litblogger may hope to fulfill a "literary life" predicated on a love of books.

This is the kind of pissing match behavior I get sick of--coming from both sides. Adam Kirsch of the NY Sun held the championship title in killing conversation, after he said "the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end". Now Ed Champion takes on the mantle by calling Dwight Garner a "pettifogger". It's both funny and sad. So who's the best pisser, guys?

Whose side am I on, anyway?

Mine. A reader who scours newspapers, blogs, Amazon lists, social cataloging sites, magazines, critical works, friends' bookcases, remote shelves of the public library's stacks... anything to find a good book to read, or a good read about books.

Tags: books, reviews, blogging, media, print, newspapers, pissing contest

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Paper Cuts and Romance

Some provocative comments today on Paper Cuts. Chick-lit author Jennifer Weiner takes Dwight Garner (senior editor of the NYT Book Review) to task for not reviewing romances.

I actually like his response very much... except for one major point. I absolutely buy this argument:

I suspect readers would think something was amiss if The Book Review didn’t weigh in on, say, the new Don DeLillo novel because it had been reviewed in the daily.

I also agree with this point, but with a twist:

We don’t have room to review so very many things we’d like to; is reviewing romances really the best use of our space? Can’t the readers who love them find news of them elsewhere?

"Finding news of books" is what it's all about. I place high value on The Book Review highlighting books that I wouldn't otherwise hear of. And I realize TBR has to balance discovery with the need to cover high-profile books. I appreciate that they do both.

But in this light, is Garner saying in part, "Romance is popular and widely available, so where's the need to highlight it?" This is where I disagree, because of the implicit assumption that "romance" is a narrow genre valued only by "romance readers".

If "romance" is Harlequins available at WalMart, and "romance readers" are a fixed population who simply buy the newest batch every month, that's a perfectly closed loop (no barriers to the market finding what they want), and reviews are indeed unnecessary. (Note that being sold at WalMart is not a comment on quality; I'm focusing on these books' wide availability/visibility).

But step back a moment, and think about the larger market. Romance is a favorite subject of literature, with broad appeal. Readers enjoy strong romance elements in literary fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, poetry, plays. Everyone's a "romance reader".

Why is that so rarely acknowledged? It's in part a matter of degree. Many novels include romance; not all novels are about romance. But there's also a larger stigma attached to romance, sex, and relationships in fiction, because they make us care. Often, a friend will recommend a thriller, then deprecatingly add, "And of course there's a romance." Why so bashful? Of course you rooted for him to get the girl, for them to work together to solve the puzzle, for him to ditch the little double-crosser. Part of your understanding of the character is about his/her behavior in relationships. And part of your satisfaction with the story depends on the resolution of the relationship, happy or not. I think the shame comes from admitting that we care about fictional characters, that we got so hooked on an unreal world that we've lost our normal cynicism.

Just as romance is present in all genres, all genres can be part of romance. Over the last decade, the "genre fiction" form of romance has diversified and converged with other genre forms. Some novels marketed as romance now have an intricate fantasy world and kick-ass protagonist, or 007 doublecrosses and guns ablazing, or social commentary as pungent as Tom Jones. These are books that should appeal to far more than "romance readers".

As for the idea that romance doesn't need to be pimped in The Book Review, I think there's all the more need in a ghettoized genre. When a genre is ignored by reviewers, some real gems are missed. It's true, there's a lot of bad romantic fiction out there; it can be hard to find the good stuff. But I find that's true in every genre; all the more need for reviews.

And on that head, I think this is a very reasonable question, and a fair offer. I'd love to see it happen:

Who does do a good job of reviewing them, anyway? Who is the Lionel Trilling of romance critics? Maybe we should hire that person, whoever he or she is.

BTW, Garner gives an interesting link on how The Book Review chooses books.

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