Peter Harris: Anorak’s Anorak On Amazon
MEET Peter Harris, a 56-year-old bachelor from Leicester. He has written more than 5,000 reviews for Amazon, the online retailer.
His reviews have been approved by about 50,000 shoppers, making him their top reviewer. He is also just outside the top 10 reviewers on the retailer’s US website.
He said: “My original motivation was to champion obscure music acts, because I have quite eclectic tastes and like some very odd things, and it just grew from there…”
Mr Harris, whose hobbies include train spotting, writes his reviews at home, saves them on to a disc and sends them to Amazon using the internet connection at his local library.
If we had an Order Of The Anorak, we’d bestow it upon him…
Posted: 13th, November 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Comments
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Unfortunately, the article from which you quoted was full of lies and half-truths. Of the stuff you quoted, let’s clear up these points.
1) At the time of the article, I’d probably posted about 2,600 reviews. The figure of 5,000 was arrived at by adding those I’d posted in Britain to those I’d posted in America, but my policy has been to post each review in both countries whenever possible, but sometimes it isn’t.
2) I did some train-spotting in the sixties at a time when it was a very popular hobby and a very sociable activity. As I explain on one of my blogs, a crowd of us schoolboys used to go to the station and play cards in the waiting room, only interrupting the game when a train was due. Better than hanging around street corners and causing trouble, eh? But the journalist heard the phrase train spotting and ignored the context.
There were plenty of other errors in the article, but you get the message, I hope.