A better review through Amazon?

We can tell ourselves and our friends from now on that reviews on Amazon are just as likely as more traditional sources of book reviews – those in news publications, for instance –  to deliver reliable and authentic judgements of their quality. According to Professor Michael Luca and colleagues, that is. They’ve carried out a survey of the top 100 reviews of non-fiction books from 40 outlets in the mass media from 2004 to 2007, including newpapers such as The Guardian (UK) and the New York Times and Washington Post. They’ve combined different sorts of information from these reviews and have compared them with reviews in Amazon. In general terms, it looks from this survey as though prize winning authors fare rather better from the professional critics in the traditional media, whereas new authors get a better response from the Amazon reviewers. It seems that it increases the likelihood of an author receiving a review by about 5% if he or she is connected in some way to a media outlet, thought it isn’t clear what this connection means in practice.