And it also makes me even less likely to trust Amazon reviews. These aren't genuine responses to books, they're just advertising that's manipulated in multiple ways by multiple people. It's becoming impossible to find any corner of Web 2.0 that isn't tainted by manipulation. Yuck.

The fascinating thing to me is that the "seller review" practices of eBay are leaking onto Amazon, so that a seller who gets five stars for delivering a used book quickly turns into a five stars for the book - and vice versa. Your carefully edited, lovingly published book? Better watch those reviews like a hawk to make sure a buyer who was unhappy with a second-hand retailer doesn't destroy its reputation. I'm sure you have lots of free time to do that.

Emily - I'm with you. This sucks.

That's a neat way of putting it ... a single software feature adds $2.7B to the topline and presumably hundreds of millions to the bottom line.

Interesting side note: Amazon won't let you post reviews if you haven't made a purchase through them. I suppose this isn't surprising, but it is disappointing.

Despite being an often uncompromising indie bookseller, I wanted to write a review for an author I know. I was even willing to create an account in order to do so. But after all of that, they wouldn't publish my comment because it had been "too long" since my last purchase.

People hang around my store, don't spend any money, and then purchase books on Amazon. Can't I hang out there without spending money as well? Apparently not.