I love my book!

Cdn book industry reacts to Amazon glitch outing author reviews of own books
By Marlene Habib
TORONTO (CP) — It may be acceptable to be the author of your own destiny, but authoring a review of your own book is another story.
Canadian book industry members reacted with disbelief Monday after learning that at least one U.S. author was mistakenly outed on Amazon.com’s Canadian website as having written a review of his own work.
The real names of thousands of people who had posted anonymous customer reviews under pseudonyms like “a reader from St. Louis” were revealed online for several days — a mistake that finally was corrected after reviewers, some of them authors themselves, complained.
The mistake, which came to light Feb. 7, occurred as a result of a computer “glitch” which occurred when customer reviews from the United States were uploaded to the Canadian site, Patricia Smith, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com, said Monday from Seattle, Wash.
“We received a few comments on our customer service line, and that’s how we became aware of it,” said Smith, adding: “The authors (who reviewed their own books) became aware of it because it involved their books.”
Smith said she wasn’t aware of any Canadian authors critiquing their own works on the site. She said the glitch was taken care of and would never happen again, but she wouldn’t give further details “for security reasons.”
Among those outed was U.S. writer John Rechy, who confessed to the New York Times during the weekend that he wrote a five-star review (the highest rating, according to Amazon.com) of his book The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens under the pseudonym “a reader from Chicago.”
“That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd,” Rechy told the Times in justifying his actions. “How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them.”
But Lascelle Wingate of the Writers’ Trust of Canada said “it’s simply dishonest” that an author would critique their own pieces using an anonymous name.
“Certainly it’s not anything we would approve of,” Wingate, executive director of the non-profit organization, said in an interview Monday.
Deborah Windsor of the Writers’ Union of Canada — started three decades ago by a group of authors including Pierre Berton and Margaret Atwood — said authors commenting on their own books shouldn’t be hiding their identities.
In fact, said Windsor, authors invited to the workshops she conducts for the union are commonly asked to comment on their own books.
“It may not be unethical, but it is a perceived unethical practice,” Windsor said about anonymous reviewing by an author. “I don’t think this would be a Canadian issue, quite frankly.”
Fred Kerner, a longtime author and member of the Canadian Authors Association based in Campbellford, Ont., since 1945, said he’s “a little shocked and a little not shocked” that authors would “bend the truth.”
“There are people who do this no matter who they are and what they are, but no writer who has a sense of propriety and a sense of self would do such a thing.”
“As an author, I feel it’s fine to push your own stuff, but not to lie about it.”
Smith said Amazon features online customer reviews for not just books, but also videos and CDs in an effort to help surfers decide what they may want to purchase.
She said that while the customer-review sections are exclusively to be filled in by only those who’ve read books or used the other products up for critiquing, that’s hard to monitor.
“They are for customers to write reviews; we don’t expect authors to be writing reviews about their own books,” she said. “But we have millions of reviews on the website at any given point, for any of the millions of items we sell, so we’re certainly not going to be policing the reviews to ensure authors don’t submit reviews from their own books.”
She added, however, that “the vast majority of authors are not going to do that (review their own books anonymously) because either they understand what customer reviews are about, or have their own features on the site to have customers make an informed decision.”