Alison Flood reports in the Guardian that a Harvard Business School study finds that “Amazon reviews are just as likely to give an accurate summary of a book’s quality as those of professional newspapers.” The study, “What Makes a Critic Tick? Connected Authors and the Determinants of Book Reviews” by Loretti I. Dobrescu, Michael Luca, and Alberto Motta, asks “what are the factors that influence reviewers?” Unsurprisingly, “when a book’s author also writes for a media outlet, that outlet is 25% more likely to review the book relative to other media outlets.” And the review is more likely to be favorable. But the study also suggests that reviewers, and the books reviewed, are determined above all by the perceived tastes of that outlet’s audience: “The New York Times has a very different audience than the Village Voice.” And all of them, it seems, have very different audiences than some of the bestselling books in the country.
