Reply #3: Online reviews can be pretty fascinating

[Posteritatis]

If I'm looking at a book on, say, Amazon, I can often get more information out of it by the astroturfed negative reviews than I can by the average or glowing ones. Around here I bring up the example of Turkish Amazon reviewers a lot - if I'm looking at a book and there's a lot of ridiculous-looking one-star reviews from Turkish nationals, no matter what their reviews say, I know it said something about Armenians that the Turkish government doesn't like, for instance. If a history text has howls about whatever -ism people hate most this week, it's not necessarily proof that said -ism is supported by the book, but the fact that certain types think it is gives me a hint as to the actual tone, etc.

So yeah. I'll often look quite a bit at reviews, but it helps a lot to read between the lines and pull things out of the reviews that the reviewers probably didn't want you to.