The Kindle Experience is Dead How do you publish a personal finance book and within forty-five days manage to achieve bestseller status even surpassing some of the titles of Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, Donald Trump, Jim Cramer, Andrew Tobias, and Rich Dad/Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki? Why does a book that only sold 32 copies in forty-five days get ranked a #1 bestseller in personal finance alongside the authors listed above who have collectively sold more than 50 million books? I discovered how Amazon ranks book sales, customer reviews, comments on reviews, books that other buyers bought, and creates Amazon recommendations. Then I bought and downloaded to my Kindle one hundred and seventy-three times my own book Wealth Hazards, wrote numerous five-star customer reviews, and voted on how helpful or unhelpful reviews were in making a purchasing decision. I did this everyday on Amazon for nearly five months. That's why the Kindle experience is dead. Why Would Anyone Still Buy A Kindle? It may be that Amazon enjoys the profits from these inaccurate sales rankings, elevated bestseller status, glowing customer reviews, and the contrived voting & ratings on helpful/unhelpful reviews. The hourly updated sales ranking and bestseller lists are displayed to every shopper and it probably helps sell more books along the long tail curve. That is selling in low volume (100 copies or less) the individual titles in the Kindle ebook inventory (more than 725,000 titles presently) equals BIG revenue in aggregate. If these inaccuracies do not benefit Amazon in some way, why would they risk being exposed again for allowing fake customer reviews to be posted or for accepting multiple "straw" purchases and then ignoring the misleading impact on sales ranking and Amazon's recommendations to customers? Why would anyone still buy a Kindle?.
The Day the Kindle Died