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Here’s an interesting New York Times piece about Amazon’s efforts to crack down on book reviews that are fake or those it deems as somehow inappropriate, which apparently include those penned by the author’s family members and other authors.

Giving raves to family members is no longer acceptable. Neither is writers’ reviewing other writers. But showering five stars on a book you admittedly have not read is fine.

After several well-publicized cases involving writers buying or manipulating their reviews, Amazon is cracking down. Writers say thousands of reviews have been deleted from the shopping site in recent months.

Amazon has not said how many reviews it has killed, nor has it offered any public explanation. So its sweeping but hazy purge has generated an uproar about what it means to review in an era when everyone is an author and everyone is a reviewer.

A quick example from my own experience here: A few months I wrote an Amazon review for a book written by a friend of mine. I had actually read the book, but you could certainly argue that I was a less-than-objective reviewer because the author is someone I know personally. I chose to deal with that by disclosing in the review itself that I knew the writer. I figured that potential readers, knowing that, could, if they chose, take my review with an extra grain of salt.

The biggest surprise to me, reading this story, was that some people seem to take reviews as serious, objective, authoritative commentary. They almost never are, on Amazon or anywhere else.

I don’t know why you’d ever take any review by someone you don’t know as anything other than a statement of personal opinion — subject the possibility, if not likelihood, that the reviewer has bad taste, is dishonest, is not that bright or is in some other way a less-than-perfect guide. Amazon’s reviews are useful mostly because there are so many of them, the wisdom of the crowd can give you some clues about the quality of the book.

Giving Mom’s Book Five Stars? Amazon May Cull Your Review