Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jhbadger 2446 days ago
Even for non-counterfeit books, Amazon defines "product" too broadly -- reviews for a book tend to combine both the printed and Kindle versions and you'll see people complaining about the formatting of the Kindle version on the page for the printed copy.
2 comments

The one thing that really frustrates me is how poorly they curate editions. This is especially bad with translated works. Like - you're on the hardcopy version of a nice, modern translation, then you click over to the e-book version and it's some random bowlderdized public domain version from 150 years ago.
This is a problem with everything being sold on amazon. I read reviews for a stamp (dates for ISO8601) and very few of the reviews are relevant to the product I was looking at. Almost none of them made sense for the product I was viewing, actually.
I was trying to buy a Grimm's Stories book for my kids and it was basically impossible. They had 5 different translations and selections of stories under the same entry.
That's a fair point, although people should read the reviews and can tell if it's content or formatting.

The alternative of separating Kindle reviews seems wrong. Most reviews are useful to buyers of both formats.