Goodreads, a subsidiary of Amazon, steps against Review Bombing to protect literary integrity. Review bombing, a practice where the reviews of a book are flooded with positive or negative reviews, has increased concern for Goodreads and readers.
There can be several reasons why such an act of review bombing is harmful to the digital reading community:
| 1. | It can manipulate the genuineness of a book, skewing the overall rating and misleading readers. |
| 2. | It can harm authors and their careers. An increase in negative reviews can hurt sales. |
| 3. | It discourages open discussions and lead to unnecessry conflict. |
Author Elizabeth Gilbert Pulled Back Her New Book
In a recent incident, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love” decided to withdraw the release of her upcoming novel “The Snow Forest” after facing a significant review bombing. The story of the book revolves around a Russian fundamentalist family, and many readers thought that it was not suitable to publish such work during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.Â
Several authors and critics rallied to support Elizabeth Gilbert, expressing discontent on Goodreads for not defending the author’s work. Goodreads should protect the writers and their books so that their ideas and thoughts do not disappear before they get a hearing.
Last year, sixteen books were withdrawn from Goodreads after falling victim to review bombing. None of these books were offensive and showed plagiarism. Yet the authors had to pull back their titles from the platform.
Roxane Gay expressed her frustration in a New York Times article, “It can be incredibly hurtful, and it’s frustrating that people are allowed to review books this way if they haven’t read them.”
Goodreads Enhances Review Monitoring
Goodreads has increased the monitoring of book reviews. It has taken measures to counter misleading reviews that can impact an author’s reputation
To counter Review Bombing, an official statement from Goodreads says, “We’ve strengthened account verification to block potential spammers, expanded our customer service team to accelerate our response time, and added more ways for our members to report problematic content.”
Users can also report fake comments and reviews on books and discussions. This will alert the team and help keep the platform with authentic discussion and unbiased space for readers.
