Phil's Law

What I term rather immodestly as Phil's Law goes something like this:

When you see a single book, in a bookshop or a library, that is from a series it is usually the second one from that series. It is almost never the first one

On first glance this seems pretty obvious. If there is more than one book in a series then the likelihood of seeing any one book is in ratio the number of books in the series. So a trilogy has a 33% per cent chance of each book being seen.

But my experience is that there's about a 60% chance of seeing the second book, 25% the third and 15% the first. Which just seems strange. And the chance of finding more than one book (especially from trilogies) seems out of proportion too, with a single book being much more likely. If a bookshop stocks books from a series would it not make sense to at least have the first one for people who want to start there?

There are rare exceptions here. Series that I found the first book of first include The Innasmorn Saga by Adrian Cole, Low Town by Daniel Polansky and The Pilgrims by Will Elliott (all fine series by the way).

Sometimes the book is a higher one in the series; I read The Lord of the Rings 'backwards' when I first read it; Return of the King then The Two Towers then The Fellowship of the Ring. I sometimes wonder if this has had a subtle effect on the way I perceive that series.

Amazon's Review Policy

With its position of huge market dominance in the book industry, for both traditional publishers but even more so for the thriving independent and self publishing authors out there, Amazon can be the making or breaking of a book.

Central to this is the Amazon review system. Read a book and liked it? Rate it highly on Amazon and sales will increase. Rate it poorly and there will be a negative impact. Reviews are everything when buying books online, and until recently Amazon had a decent platform for doing this.

I review books all the time - lots of books, both ones I'm currently reading and ones I've read over the years. All freely and in my spare time because I enjoy books, promoting reading and supporting authors. And I post all of these reviews to as many places as I can - Goodreads is the primary resource but I copy the text out to Amazon UK, Amazon US, Waterstones, Kobo and Barnes and Noble sites (provided they carry the books). Spreading the word is the best way to boost book sales. My review ranking is pretty good and I have a lot of 'helpful' upvotes on my reviews.

But now things have changed. I live in the UK and so all of my transactions are naturally through the UK Amazon site, both for convenience and also because if I try to buy through the US site it encourages me to use the UK one. But now Amazon have decided that in order to post reviews to the US site, I need to have spent $50 on the US site in the last 12 months. But I can't because I'm in the UK.

So despite the fact that I can post my reviews quite happily in the UK, and I definitely spend more than $50 a year with Amazon as a company (as a Prime subscriber and other purchases), I can't post reviews to the US site any more. So that means that my opinion as a normal reader of a book isn't being seen by potential purchasers, which hurts both Amazon and of course the authors and publishers themselves.

So why have Amazon done this? I suspect there was some aspect of trying to curb fake reviews - either positive ones for poor products or damaging ones for those of a rival - and this approach no doubt won approval pretty quickly because there was also the added bonus of getting people to spend a little more.

However, it seems to me that this has done nothing to address that and indeed has probably made it worse. Sure you'll reduce the number of frivolous or spam reviews, but as the reviews are moderated anyway that's never been a big problem. But the biggest culprits of fake reviews is business, not individuals, and for most business $50 in order to post a few fake reviews to boost their sales (or remove sales from their competitors) would be money well spent. So they will still keep posting them.

Meanwhile the voices that really count, the average consumer, have now been reduced. Those who don't routinely buy from Amazon are now discarded, their opinion clearly worthless to Amazon when in fact their opinion is the one that counts the most. And for people like me who live in a different country and are just trying to help by posting honest reviews it hurts most of all because there's nothing we can do about it. Is my opinion to be discarded simply because I don't live in the US? That's protectionism to a whole new and unacceptable level.

So what Amazon has done is made their reviews less trustworthy at a stroke whilst also damaging their core business of books and publishing at the same time. Congratulations Amazon.

Why not count purchases made from Amazon as a whole? Why not look at people's review record to see if they are fake or not? Why not? Because Amazon don't care.

New Kobo Woes

After being reduced to one shared eReader in the household (a Kobo as it happens) after the getting-on-a-bit 5 button Kindle finally gave up, I invested in a Kindle Touch and Kobo Touch so we are back to full strength with 3 in the house.

The Kindle Touch was fine, no problem at all. The Kobo, because it was starting from factory settings, insisted on putting the latest firmware update on.

Apart from changing the front screen and some other bits of the interface (which I know a lot of people don't like but honestly as long as I can read books on it I don't care about it trying to sell me content every time I go to the home screen) one change caused me a bit of frustration. It may hit you so here is the problem, what has caused it, and how to get around it.

The problem manifests itself when trying to read a book. All the books show in the library, with front covers, sizes, everything looks normal. But when you open the book it is just blank - and the Kobo marks it as 100% read, as if the book is empty even though it clearly isn't.

The cause of this is that the default font for books has changed from Georgia to 'Publisher's Chosen Font'. This means that if your eBook doesn't specify a font (and my experience is that very very few do) the Kobo essentially displays it with no font, therefore no words appear. The whole book fits on one page so therefore it's 100% read.

Reportedly Kobo are working on a fix for this. But in the meantime the books can be recovered by setting the font for each book back to Georgia. With the blank page up, go to the settings menu (tap at the bottom of the screen on my version), select the character/font settings (the two As) and change the font to Georgia (or indeed any other one in the list of your choosing). The content will now appear and book will be as if the update had never happened.