Another tolling bell? Reviews in the age of Amazon

by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Jim's timely post yesterday on the paying for reviews scandal involving the self-published 'John Locke' got me thinking about the changing nature and validity of 'reviews' in the cyber-age. 

We've had flame-wars, hate campaigns as well 'friend'-reviewing and, more recently, the purchasing of favorable Amazon reviews all in the name of attaining that most coveted of prizes - the title of 'bestselling author'. Given all the hoopla, I was interested to see The Guardian's book blog posting question 'are Amazon reader reviews killing off the critic?' In this blog post they ask whether ongoing issues with Amazon reviews have killed off the book review or whether they have actually made traditional, editor-commissioned book reviews more important than ever? 

I have been mulling over same thing though wondering whether the answer to this question is even relevant.  It's clear that most people buy books based on the recommendations of friends and from 'word of mouth' rather than Amazon reviews - though in this day and age, word-of-mouth opinions is often generated by online hype which (as the John Locke case illustrates) are easily open to manipulation.  

While I like Jim's solution to open up more books for readers to look at online - so they can read sample chapters  for themselves and decide - I still wonder about the increasing irrelevance of reviews. 

At the moment I view most Amazon reviews with skepticism - as more-often than not the one-star review sounds like a rant and the five-star review sounds like pandering. However, I also find it's getting increasingly harder to distinguish promotion from objective reviews online at all, and it's pretty clear that publishers and authors alike are desperate for anything that will set them apart from the background 'noise' of the Internet. This means for me, at least, I take most online reviews with a grain of salt. I do, however, continue to view reviews found in newspapers, magazines and journals with some degree of confidence. Not that I will agree with the reviewer by any means - but I do regard what is written as an actual critical appraisal rather than an exercise in PR. 

So what do you think? Have online reader review sites basically killed off the traditional book critic? Do you think independent book reviews (in newspapers or other media formats) still resonate with readers or are they of only marginal importance?