I’m sorry to hear that!

I can imagine a scenario, but I don’t know if this what happened.

Publisher books the book out for free.

You get it.

Amazon gets complaints about the bad quality. Tells the publisher to fix it or Amazon will take it off sale.

Publisher lets it get withdrawn.

Meanwhile, publisher publishes the same book as a different version, where perhaps the quality is good. It has a different ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number).

Now, I would have thought, in this case, that you would still be able to download it from

http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle

I thought it would only become unavailable for download from there if it was withdrawn for legal reasons.

After all, we’re given the choice to accept an updated version or not, usually.

If you do check with Kindle Support on this

http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

I’d be interested to hear what they tell you…

I also have several family members on my Amazon account who enjoy my books. I say keep the licensing as it is … no disappearing ink!

I do think the answer on this is going to be some sort of social circles. You see reviews just from your friends or from groups to which you subscribe.

Another interesting possibility would be to let reviewers self-identify, and then apply those filters. For example, you allow reviewers to self-identify (to Amazon) their ages. You can then apply an age filter to see how people of a particular age feel about the book. They could self-identify by political party, or as “Twi-Hards”…hm, this could be a really big deal, now that I think about it. You’d have to not let people change their identification tags for, oh, six months at a time (to prevent people constantly shifting them to skew results). I may need to write a post on this…thanks for the inspiration!

I don’t have a problem with that…I think encouraging reviews is a good thing. I assume one of the differences in ILMK’s ranking on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com is that it only has one poor review there. It’s also due, no doubt, to my necessary focus on the USA (I can’t easily see other countries’ specials and such), but I suspect that more positive reviews would make a difference.

Paying people to write reviews for you does feel different to me, though.

That’s an interesting perspective! I would have said that romance publishers have particularly good at providing free books…they’ve also been leaders on that in paperbooks. There are a lot of ninety-nine cent romances. I’ve seen bundles and subscriptions for romance e-books. I haven’t looked much at “brand name” romance authors…maybe that’s where the issue lies?

The key thing seems to be that such people go to the trouble of writing lots of reviews that are helpful – giving people information they might want to know before buying something, and as another has already noted, writing reviews for products that don’t already have dozens of other reviews. To me, it’s just a way of “paying it forward”, as such reviews have been a huge help to me in my own purchases over the years.

One down side I’ve realized is that it can be brutal to a reviewer’s rank to give only one (I hate it) or two (I don’t like it) Amazon stars to a product with fans, I don’t care about my rank, so call them as I see them, but am now more cautious about drawing conclusions about products that get 3 (It’s OK) stars from ranked reviewers.

The book reviews by others that I personally appreciate the most are those that alert me to things I need to be aware of about the book in advance, such as whether or not it includes a lot of swearing or adult issues. Many temporarily-free books are down-rated in reviews for being badly-formatted or having spelling and grammatical errors, but I worry less about that, as Amazon often offers me a free update later with such errors corrected. That said, if I were writing books again, I’d edit them very carefully before letting anyone review them, as some reviews are brutal about such errors.

One unexpected benefit of being a Vine reviewer is that we are offered free advance copies of forthcoming books (and sometimes other products) to review. That ensures such products will have at least a few reviews immediately upon release.

“How about…a book where the ink disappears two months after you open it?”

That happens unintentionally to the labels printed by dedicated label printers. (They don’t use ink, but heat.)