My guess why that book received so many votes is because it appeals to a wide cross-section of the field, and there are simply more people looking at it than say a
Java book you may have reviewed. For example, I've only done
eight reviews so far, but out of those, only one of the books was not really slanted towards Java, but that one has received the most votes (of course it's a popular book). So I guess what I'm saying is that you'll probably get voted on more often for books with a wider appeal (well, duh!). I bet Amazon has some pretty cool stats that correlate the number of times a review is voted on, to the number of page views the page a review is on receives.
What I still haven't figured out, is why on earth some reviews get voted as "not helpful". For me, I only ever rate something as "not helpful" if it really gives no useful information about the book. A review that pretty much only said "This book is great!", for example, would be one that I would vote as "not helpful". I know it goes with the territory and all, but I pride myself on being thorough (within the confines of review length restrictions), so when I look at the "not helpful" votes that a couple of my reviews have received, I can't even hazard a guess as to what was found to be objectionable (I understand the "not helpful" for the regex book, since my review was slightly slanted towards Java).
Maybe Tom or some others have thoughts about this?
[ October 06, 2003: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]