Here’s a shocker… (The Klausner Post)
By JP Frantz |
Monday, September 29th, 2003 at
4:22 pm
Harriet Klausner reviewed Quicksilver and gave it 5 stars. I know, how improbable is that. She never likes any book. Oh wait, that’s John and Scott recommended books. Sorry.
Anyhow, I’ll be picking this up in anticipation of the Austin trip and booksigning! Woo hoo!
Filed under: Books
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Harriet Klausner is the David Manning of book reviewers!
I just found about Harriet Klausner today. I usually skip to the lowest rating reviews, if what they criticize is not important to me, then I buy the book.
Harriet’s reviews are not reviews, those are plot summaries. Amazon needs to stop her. Just create a hundred or so reviewers doing her same work and you’ll fool everyone for a little more time.
For those who have questions about how the Amazon ranking system works, see Amazon Voting Rubric. This is something I decoded back in 2001, and they haven’t changed anything basic in it since.
Of relevance to this discussion, negative votes do have an influence on a person’s rank, but they have much less effect than positive votes.
As far as HK’s output is concerned, yes, it is incredible, but Lawrance Bernabo the #2 reviewer has matched and in fact exceeded Harriet’s output, though it should be noted that Lawrence reviews many other things than just books, many of which don’t take nearly as long to evaluate as books do. Unlike Harriet’s reviews, Lawrance’s are usually thoughtful, well written, and really do provide potential customers a decent handle on whether the product is worth purchasing. Lately, however, Lawrance has deleted a large number of his reviews, due to snit with Amazon over a new feature that allows people to comment on reviews, and is artificially holding his total number to 6666.
Read this paper: Six Degrees of Reputation: the use and abuse of online recommendation systems (by Shay David and Trevor Pinch, of Cornell University). It’s very relevant to the online reviewing (and shilling and so on). A good piece.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_3/david/index.html
Also available for download as .pdf at:
http://www.shaydavid.info/papers.html (the first item on page).
Sorry, I forgot to mention: a few more interesting links:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/o/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/booknook/entries/2007/03/29/the_mysterious_harriet_klausne.html
http://www.daytondailynews.com/o/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/booknook/entries/2007/04/04/bogus_book_reviews_on_amazonco.html
http://www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/booknook/entries/2007/04/14/amazoncom_book_reviewer_shakeo.html
Thanks John (his name is my name too, but I digress.) The paper titled Six Degrees of Reputation was awesome.
I was just dissapointed I couldn’t post a review of it on the site.
On which site?
On the First Monday site – but honestly that was a joke – wanting to post a review of a paper about the nature of reviews.
scottsh, I understood that was a joke.
What is “the First Monday site” ?
I see people slamming HK’s reviews on Amazon- creating hate-threads attached to the reviews and all I can think is — wow, I wonder how that writer feels about that?
Okay- so maybe HK is a joke- who knows- but you people who attack her and in turn attack the writers that she has reviewed (WHO HAD NO SAY IN THE MATTER) just piss me off.
Instead of spending your time flitting around Amazon and Barnes & Noble looking reading her “reviews” maybe you could all start buying books and actually provide REAL REVIEWS.
:-$
“writergirl” – I agree completely in most aspects. That’s why I do in fact read and review books often.
However, fraud must be exposed. We don’t know for a fact that HK is a fraud, but I fear that she is and so I feel compelled to come forward with whatever evidence I have and share that with the broader community.
The fact that this has exposed other problems with the Amazon review system is a fun side-effect.
And First Monday is the name of the site that you linked to first that included the essay, John Jacob – http://www.firstmonday.org.
Aw… silly me. Thanks scottsh.
——————————————————————–
writergirl wrote:
>I see people slamming HK’s reviews on Amazon- creating hate-threads
>attached to the reviews and all I can think is — wow, I wonder how
>that writer feels about that?
What does the writer have to do with it? That said, who cares? Why should that writer worry about HK, her reviews, and user comments on her reviews? Also, how did that writer feel about getting HK to review his book?
> Okay- so maybe HK is a joke- who knows-
Oh, you’re not sure, I see. Really, who knows? Today our dear old Harriet dumped 68 reviews on Amazon, but, hey, who knows… maybe she did read 68 books today, right?
>Instead of spending your time flitting around Amazon and Barnes
>& Noble looking reading her “reviews” maybe you could all start
>buying books and actually provide REAL REVIEWS.
When we need your advice, we’ll ask for it. Meantime, if you have a book out, don’t hire shills like HK to puff it.
bah, y’all totally missed it… didn’t you realize? “writergirl” is HARRIET KLAUSNER!! She’s even gotten to the point where she didn’t care if you read her reviews, she just want you to buy the books…
JP, did you log where her post came from? is it from the same subnet as Amazon.com?
My Elves are Different takes a swing.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
We are pleased to announce the foundation of The Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society!
http://harriet-rules.blogspot.com/
As Harriet would say, “your welcome” (to visit, we hasten to add
THKAS
You made my day!
This series of posts fascinated me. Nobody has mentioned the financial incentive such reviewers may have. Many freelance reviewers get free books from publishers, which they sell for 25 percent of the cover price to bookstores that buy review copies (which mark them up and sell them at half price). This could amount to thousands of dollars a months for reviewers who get all the titles of major publishers. And it can lead to tremendous review inflation, because reviewers who give negative reviews may have the cash flow cut off.
I’ve always had a policy on my site, One-Minute Book Reviews, of never taking free books from publishers (and publicizing that policy) and trying to fight review inflation in other ways — for example, by giving the annual Delete Key Awards (announced every year on March 15) to the authors of the year’s worst writing in books. In many ways, this makes it much harder to do the site, because I can’t review books that I can’t afford to buy and can’t get from a library. But the site has grown much faster than I expected. One reason may be that many readers share the kind of suspicions posted on SFSignal. Thanks for bringing all those five-star reviews to people’s attention.
Thanks for the input, Janice. And in the interest of full disclosure, know that SF Signal receives review copies of books, too. We publish that fact, and the books received, on our Books Received page which is easily accessible from the top-left widget on our home page.
For what it’s worth, I think self-respect is too high a price to pay for selling review copies and inflating reviews. Our review copies are either boxed for the eventual dream library (hello…biblioholic here
) or donated to libraries and trustworthy friends. Profiting beyond the books’ intended purpose is just wrong.
But now we’re getting off-topic. Commence with the Klausner-bashing!
John, I disagree. Klausner is certainly the most egregious example, but there’s a crowd of “reviewers” like her (him? it? they?) on Amazon and everywhere else. The problem is not Klausner; the problem is the obvious large-scale shilling. Now, as far as this:
> I think self-respect is too high a price to pay for
> selling review copies and inflating reviews
please check out our friend John Matlock “Gunny” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1M8PP7MLHNBQB?tag=sfsi0c-20).
He’s been selling his books under the name “newbooksinprint” (http://www.amazon.com/shops/newbooksinprint?tag=sfsi0c-20).
Reviewer W. Boudville (http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/AG35NEEFCMQVR/?tag=sfsi0c-20) reads half a dozen books a day, and wouldn’t you know it, mostly likes them! If we are to assume that one must read the books one reviews, today he’s read six books with the total count of 2337 pages! If that’s not enough, consider this: most of these books are technical, engineering, and scientific: that is, not the easiest ever reading material.
Reviewer Robert Morris (http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A26JGAM6GZMM4V/?tag=sfsi0c-20) reads on average a book or two a day. All his reviews appear to be five-star ones. He’s read about fifteen hundred books and never saw a bad one! A book or two a day!
Klausner is not alone.
Apparently there are different thresholds for self-respect. :O
I have been reading with interest your views on HK, and some of them, (or most) may be true. But put yourselves into the same position as the author’s who have sent their book to be reviewed by HK. At least the reviews are positive, and maybe this is why so many writers contact her. Most people, (if they are honest) would rather have a five star review from ANYONE, never mind HK, than have a one star abusive review from someone that perhaps for personal reason’s, is out to crucify them and has the ability to do so by simply buying one of their books.
G, how about just honest reviews from people who actually read the book? And perhaps — oh, what a thought! — even bought it themselves with the express purpose or *reading it* (rather than reviewing on author’s request).
Check this guy out:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1SPSG3C94HVH8/?tag=sfsi0c-20
Wow, that guy should just change his name to Cutten Paster. Seriously, maybe Amazon should spend less time giving Harriet exclusive posting rights and police their reviewers more. I’m just sayin’…
Amazon obviously offers a tacit approval to all these shenanigans. Probably (one has to guess) because it helps sell books, or at least, they hope it will. I mean, how hard would it be to check if a reviewer posts too many reviews daily, like 20/30/90 a day? A computer could do it… and yet, it’s not done. Amazon is full of it.
And, btw, about Cutten Paster (Mark-O): in addition to puffing books from one publisher (less than a solid one, unfortunately) and copy/pasting the same BS blurb to all his ‘reviews’, it turns out he sells all these books in the ‘used’ section. Just go to any of the books he’s reviewed (except the last one), click on the ‘used and new’ link, and look for seller ‘ ship-now-books’; then visit Mark-O’s profile and see what his nickname is).
I think I finally got how HK is able to write all those reviews.
In her own words from her Amazon profile:
I am a speed reader( a gift I was born with) and read two books a day.
So that is the secret. Its not only that she was born with the ability to read, but was born with the ability to speed read, a skill many never attain in their life. I just can imagine her parents putting in her crib, instead of a nice rattle, a stack of paperbacks she read and obviously loved by the sound of her incessant gooing. (Hey you find a better way to stop a baby crying.)
Now she is just catching up. Perhaps she just recently learned to write.
She reads two books a day, but reviews sixty. Her profile needs to be updated, it seems, to claim that she was born with the gift of reading sixty books a day. Oh wait, no! She once posted ninety-six reviews in one day.
This calls into question the very notion of ‘reading’. One can literally look at the words, but is that reading? Shouldn’t there be some threshold of original thought and analysis on the part of the reader?
Here’s how I think she does it. She reads the blurbs on the book. She reads approximately 5-15 pages chosen somewhat randomly from the book(the first few, a couple in the middle, a little towards the end). Then she writes a formulaic ‘review’ which includes a few details beyond the blurbs, details culled from the limited sampling to show that she ‘read’ the book. So, in essence, she’s skimming thousands of books. What is the value of doing this? A cottage industry perfectly suited to the content overload and instant gratification that defines much of popular culture.
Harriet’s reviews look like they’re either re-wordings of book jackets or of whatever the publisher puts out when they release a book. Since darned near every review is 5 stars, with a token 4 star review thrown in, it’s just worthless. If you love everything you read, Harriet, your standards are as high as Britney Spears’ taste in men.
I’m also on the anti-HK bandwagon. She’s recently ‘reviewed’ and posted major spoilers for not one, not two, but FIVE books I wanted to read. It pissed me off so much that I sent a full-on complaint to Amazon yesterday. Just a few minutes ago I received a reply from a Mr. Amir, who I’m sure is a nice enough gentleman in some ginormous call center in New Delhi, but who I’m also sure couldn’t care less about my complaint. Mr. Amir asked me for more specific information, which I provided in great detail.
We’ll see if I get any response. Somehow I doubt I will.
What would make me happy is if Amazon had a feature, as in many discussion forums, where you could set a user/reviewer on your ‘ignore’ list, thereby making invisible to you everything that person posts. Bam. Problem solved, for me anyway.
Update: Amazon took down two offending Klausner reviews that I’d pointed out. When I asked what disciplinary action has been taken, since it’s not the first and certainly won’t be the last time she’s spoiled a book for somebody, Amazon said it’s not their policy to take disciplinary action in cases like this.
I then asked why Amazon allows reviewers to blatantly flaunt their POSTED RULES of reviewing. I have yet to receive an answer.
Well, actually she doesn’t have to read the back of covers or troll through reviews. She’s an acquisitions person for a bookstore. That means she gets sent press packets, copies of early reviews like Kirkus, and can call up a publisher and get any information she wants. It also means that she does read a fair number of books, or skims them, for her day job, so it’s probably easy to do some reviews. But it is also easy for her to just make them up by copying material in the catalogs and publicity sheets and email notifications she gets from publishers. Her reviews may go up right away on Amazon because she is a bookseller. This also may explain why upset authors don’t get much sympathy and are afraid of her– her power isn’t her reviews, which are never negative, but her position as the one who decides what books are in a store, and the ability to build bad buzz, if she so chose, in the bookselling community, which is a small one.
I stumbled over this thread after having the misfortune to find Klausner’s scam on Amazon today. Disgusting woman. Love the thread, however. :-@
I’ve also been been rather irritated by Midwest Book Review. Their Amazon profile shows they have reviewed nearly 35,000 books, and all of them are 5 star reviews as far as I can see.
While they at least don’t pretend to be one person, it seems Gale Research have worked out some deal MBR with to use their reviews Gale’s products. (6)
Check out BookCrossing.com–Harriet’s one of the top people with most books registered. (I am, too, but I haven’t read most of what I register.) She posts reviews at BookCrossing, too, and her member profile is several paragraphs long. I especially like her husband’s suggested epitaph for her: Give me literature or give me death.
She’s married? I feel bad for the poor guy, when would he get any attention when she’s, literally, reading 24×7!! John, didn’t you do the math on that where she would have to read 24×7 in order to put out that many reviews?
I never paid attention to the reviewer ranks until. Something that I looked at out of sheer boredom has provided me with some entertainment. I think HK is a fraud. I think she just recopies dust jackets and skims a few pages of the book. Nothing she says is helpful. I found the comments here–which I read, all of them–to be amusing. I agree with 99% of the comments here.
You guys are so funny. Is Harriet a computer or what? It’s truly not humanly possible to read so many books and write so many reviews. As of today, January 8, 2007 she has posted 15,512 reviews. Unbelievable!
My.Name.Is.H.K-9000.B. [stop]
I.Am.Most.Definitely.Not.A.Computer. [stop]
I.Am.An.Ancient.Teletype.Machine.Stuck.In.An.Infinite.Loop. [stop]
I.Can.Turn.Any.Snoozer.Into.The.Great.American.Novel. [stop]
I.Have.Spoken. [stop]
Stop.Posting.Comments.Against.Me. [stop]
Stop.It. [stop]
Stop. [stop]
My.Name.Is.H.K-9000.B. [stop]
I.Am.Most.Definitely.Not.A.Computer. [stop]
I.Am.An.Ancient.Teletype.Machine.Stuck.In.An.Infinite.Loop. [stop]
I.Can.Turn.Any.Snoozer.Into.The.Great.American.Novel. [stop]
I.Have.Spoken. [stop]
Stop.Posting.Comments.Against.Me. [stop]
Stop.It. [stop]
Stop. [stop]
My.Name.Is.H.K-9000.B. [stop]
I.Am.Most.Definitely.Not.A.Computer. [stop]
I.Am.An.Ancient.Teletype.Machine.Stuck.In.An.Infinite.Loop. [stop]
—- Transmission Truncated —
So, to summarize:
1) Everyone who’s done the math has concluded, correctly, that Klausner can’t possibly have read as many books as she reviews.
2) Authors and fellow reviewers have repeatedly pointed out errors in her reviews, and most agree the “reviews” are just reworked dust jacket summaries.
3) Klausner’s still at it.
I think the interesting thing here is that Klausner has taken lying to an international level. Everyone with half a brain knows Klausner is a liar. The readers know it, the authors know it and Amazon knows it. It’s like that guy in the original Zelda says, “It’s a secret to everybody.”
So it makes me wonder why, since this has become such a joke, Amazon not only allows her to continue lying daily to a huge audience, but actually grants her special access and privileges. At some point, doesn’t the obviousness of a fraud surpass the desire for positive book reviews?
Check out Barbara Vey’s blog at http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/880000288/post/460020646.html today.
Someone commented “As an example, after I agreed to write Bayou Bad Boys a few years ago, one of the writers got ill and had to drop out. Unfortunately, the story description she’d sent in to Brava got on the back of the ARC under the replacement author’s name. (Fortunately it was changed before the actual book was published!) But HK reviewed all three novellas described. Even one that didn’t exist. Because it had never been written!!”
And another wrote “Harriet Klausner actually plagiarised her review of my book from several sources, even so far as to repeating the wrong facts of a another reviewer (the ACTUAL reviewer printed a correction).”
If anyone is really interested in Sinking Harriet Klausner and the many other fraudulent posters, here is the way to do it.
Add Harriet Klausners RSS feed to her book reviews, so whenever she posts a new review you know about it.
Write your own review using information from Klausners, but add negative comments about the whole ordeal, I.E. where Harriet writes “…thus readers obtain a sweet satirical glimpse of the elite through life in the Badenweiler health resort; pampering being the cure of all ills. Lighthearted yet insightful, fans will appreciate Gene Wilder’s amusing yet deep THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN’T. ” You write “therefore avid fans get an overwritten satire of the historically inaccurate Badenweiler health resort.. blah blah.. fans of Gene Wilder will do well to skip this one, spend the money by going to a resort yourself..”
Then give the book 1 star.
When everything that Harriet reviews starts getting one 4 or 5 star review and forty-five 1 star reviews from a small-but-nimble grass-roots organization of blog and amazon.com readers, no one in their right mind will ask her to review their book.
You seem to suggest that books be knocked down just because Harriet Klausner reviewed them and gave them five stars. That would be unfair to the authors, don’t you think? Two wrongs don’t do one right.
Some people seem to be assuming that writers are personally requesting reviews from Harriet Klausner. I can’t see why they would be thinking this. From the sound of it, her reviews are cribbed straight from Kirkus reviews and the back of dust jackets – there’s no reason to think that any of the writers are involved in any way.
Would you vultures PLEASE leave Harriet alone? Can’t you see that she’s just a frail old woman who just wants to make the world a happier place no matter what kind of crap people put out as a writer?
Leave Harriet alone!! It doesn’t matter that she never read of the books that she supposedly reviews or if she just copy the material from somewhere else. Would you deny her her passion of giving everything 5 stars??
Please leave Harriet alone!
I think it’s fairly obvious HK has some kind of OCD… who else would spend this much time writing the reviews alone? I read an interview with her talking about being a “collector” of books. Which I would say I am too, but I would not let half of the books she reviews in my house! She’s obviously doing this for the books. She’s a sick old lady, who has too many books rather than cats.
A frail old woman? 50 bucks says “she’s” some random 15 year old guy with no life and who somehow finds it amusing to add positive background noise to reviews on amazon. I’d like to see the times between the posting of each review. Chances are he/she just goes online and pops over to some titles he/she doesn’t recognise and writes something good about them.
Anyway, I have developed a way of discrediting her once and for all:
1. I am going to create book title and author from scratch, and verify that neither this book nor its author actually exist.
2. I will email the name and author of this bogus bok to HK and ask for a review.
3. Before long, the 5 star rating will come in. I will then reveal to her that she has reviewed a non-existent book and that my prank is soon to be posted online.
Done!
Back in the dark ages of the Internet (1997) I reviewed books for a now defunct website called “Under the Covers Book Reviews” Reviewers sometimes got ARCS or books from the publishers but since this was early in the days on the net, we mostly just reviewed books we bought ourselves. Another reviewer for that site was Harriet Klausner – and most of us hated her because no matter how fast we read a book, she’d always already have a damn review up in her classic “two paragraphs of summary, one paragraph of vague praise highly suitable for putting on a book cover” Plus, she’d whore those same crap reviews to any and every book site on the net.
10 years I’ve held a grudge against her and long for the day when it comes out she’s a total fake
Harriet’s demonic powers extend beyond speed reading: she can also shapeshift! A quick google search found these two sites. Hmmm…
http://thebestreviews.com/user5
http://harrietklausner.wwwi.com/
Alastair Reynolds’s novel “The Prefect” features a world where speed reading is measured by the “Klausner Index”- she didn’t notice that in her review either.
Apologies on the double post; I only just realised what I’m about to put in here. Anyway, I happened to acquire a book “cybernetica”- not the best book in the world, but still- it has part of a review of hers on the back. The entire review can be read here: http://www.bookreview.com/$spindb.query.listreview2.booknew.14287
Not only is this stereotypical Klausner material, but the information in it is completely, utterly wrong! It has no government-industrial-media complex- in fact, the government and corporations are at war throughout the entire book! It is, however, exactly what you would think was going down were you to read the book’s blurb, and nothing else. Hmmmm…