Book reviews from Old Books by Dead Guys will no longer appear at Amazon.com. They cancelled me!
When one submits a review to Amazon, they have an automated system that searches for words and phrases that may be offensive. This is how they keep profanity, hate speech, spamming, and just plain rudeness off their site. If the system finds something it doesn’t like, it sends the reviewer a message saying it won’t post the review, but it doesn’t tell you what exactly you did wrong.
To give an example of this automated censorship, I once wrote a review of a book by Alexandre Dumas, in which I used the word “Dumas’s.” After Amazon’s robot gatekeeper rejected the review, I figured out that it was because that was too close to the word “dumbass.” I changed that word, and it posted the review.I’ve had 5 to 10 reviews rejected over the past decade, out of 1300+ submissions. The most recent one was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back, because all of my reviews, even the hundreds formerly deemed acceptable, have now been removed from the Amazon site. I doubt that any human being at Amazon has actually read my reviews. I have been banned by a software program.
So from now on, the only place one will be able to find my reviews is here at this blog. That’s too bad, because I think more people were reading them on Amazon than here. Oh well, if I really cared about the number of readers, I would have stopped writing this blog years ago. I basically just write it for my own enjoyment and will continue to do so.
Almost every review posted to this blog thus far ends with a link to the book’s Amazon page. Now none of those links will work. Just letting you all know, because I’m not going to go through 1400 blog posts and delete all of those links.
Thank you for reading Old Books by Dead Guys!
