Thursday, October 29, 2015

Harriet Klausner, the woman who wrote 31,014 Amazon book reviews, dead at 63

This morning, while surfing on Google News, I discovered a rather lengthy, in depth article on the Washington Post website titled The woman who wrote 31,014 Amazon book reviews and upended the Internet, dead at 63 by Sarah Kaplan. In the article, Ms. Kaplan writes the following:
Harriet Klausner’s story might be that of a woman who loved books and wanted to praise them in effusive (if somewhat error-prone) prose. It might also be the story of a numbers-obsessed shill who pretended to read thousands of books and then duped consumers by posting pointless reviews about them.
Regardless, it’s a story about the Internet, where democracy and mediocrity go hand in hand and powerful communities can form around topics as obscure as one lady with a (disputed) love of books.
Sarah Kaplan's article immediately grabbed my attention as I've purchased many books (as well as many other items) from Amazon over the years. I've also written quite a few reviews of the things I've purchased on Amazon's website as well. 
When writing book reviews on Amazon, I couldn't help but notice that there was a certain reviewer on Amazon named Harriet Klausner, that was VERY PROLIFIC in her book review postings on Amazon. In fact, there was a time when Harriet Klausner was the number one reviewer on Amazon. 

I could never quite figure out how Ms. Klausner wrote anywhere from as little as 1 to 4 book reviews a day to upwards of 10 to 20 book reviews on a near daily basis. It didn't quite seem possible to me that one woman could read and then write that many book reviews on Amazon's website on a daily basis. 

I've always wondered when Ms. Klausner found the time to eat, sleep, clean her home and other daily chores/tasks throughout the day... Like interacting with people and so on. I also wondered if more than one person was logging in as Harriet Klausner and leaving book reviews on Amazon.

Click on the above link to read the full article. 

Until my next post, happy reading!!

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