Zardon

This "clever" author of a $3 Self Help PDF has written a program to put his book in as a recommendation 12 times, on every single top seller at Amazon (at least random collection I checked in the first 500 top sellers).

As a result he is now the #3 best seller on Amazon.
Based on the feedback reviews, this has been going on for over a week.

Seems like a complete breakdown of the Amazon customer recommendation system. Yet... no action by Amazon, and it's starting to spread.

For instance, I was looking up the new book by Alton Brown (Good Eats) Food + Heat = Cooking and found 8 recommendations (2 as a replacement!) for yet another self help book: Birdseed Cookies: A Fractured Memoir.

Looking at this best selling How I Play Golf by Tiger Woods, I find the top recommendation (towering over any others with 5 duplicate recommendations) for Open Your Mind, Open Your Life: A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom.

Not exactly a close topic.

Not suprisingly, the same book has multiple recommendations in numerous random best sellers.

Amazon does have a 24hour hold on customer recommendation submissions (I tested it, none of my submissions from about 8 hours ago have appeared yet). But it seems there is no human review, or even simple flood checking going on.

by tandoor