The Deluge of Drivel: Are Book Reviews Losing Their Way?

Updated Oct 2026: this editorial has been rewritten and now cites its sources.

Book reviews now arrive from every direction: newspapers and magazines, blogs, video platforms and, in the largest numbers, retail and social reading sites. That abundance helps readers, but it has also brought documented problems, from coordinated fake reviews to books falsely attributed to real authors. This editorial examines those problems, the responses from platforms and regulators, and what readers, authors and publishers can do to keep reviews useful.

The scale problem

Open review platforms allow anyone to respond to a book, and that is their strength. It also means a small number of bad actors can distort the picture for everyone else. The clearest recent case came in December 2023, when Del Rey, a Penguin Random House imprint, dropped debut author Cait Corrain after she admitted using fake Goodreads accounts. In her own words, quoted by the Guardian, she "boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive."

NPR reported that Goodreads removed the fake reviews and said it would intervene during periods of intense activity that suggest review-bombing. Manipulation on that scale is not always so visible.

Fake books, not just fake reviews

The problem reaches beyond reviews to the listings themselves. In August 2023 the Guardian reported that Amazon removed five books falsely listed under the name of publishing industry writer Jane Friedman, which she believed were AI-generated. The following month Amazon began requiring self-publishers to declare whether content is AI-generated, according to the Guardian.

When a book is not what it claims to be, its reviews cannot be trusted either. A reader who sees a familiar author's name on a cover reasonably assumes that the author wrote it.

The regulatory backstop

In the United States, fake reviews are now covered by a specific rule. The Federal Trade Commission's Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, effective 21 October 2024, prohibits businesses from creating or selling reviews that misrepresent whether the reviewer exists or used the product, from buying reviews, and from offering incentives conditioned on a positive or negative review. The Commission noted that the rule will also enable it to seek civil penalties against violators.

For authors and publishers the implication is plain. Asking readers for honest reviews is permitted. Paying for favorable reviews, or posting reviews under invented identities, is the conduct the rule targets. The rule also bars certain insiders, such as company officers or managers, from writing reviews or testimonials without clearly disclosing their relationship.

What reviews are for

The problems above are reasons for care, not reasons to dismiss reviews altogether. Criticism that explains its judgment keeps its value precisely because readers can test it. The Guardian's review of Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, which called it a new cultural landmark, set out its reasons in detail. A reader can disagree with a review of that kind, but cannot mistake it for an anonymous number.

Research also counsels caution when reading aggregate ratings. Balázs Kovács and Amanda Sharkey found that award-winning books' Goodreads ratings fell faster after a win than those of books that lost, because the prize brought in readers less suited to the book. An average rating says as much about the people who rated a book as it does about the book.

Trusted curation still works

The same period shows how much readers value a recommendation they trust. NPR reported in 2019 that the 26 books picked by Reese Witherspoon's book club had, according to NPD BookScan, sold almost 700% better than the average, and that the first five picks of the "Read with Jenna" club had overperformed the fiction market by about 500%. An earlier study of Oprah Winfrey's book club, reported by BYU News, found that all of the first eleven books she picked reached the top four of USA Today's list within the week she recommended them.

Those figures show that a named, accountable recommender can still move readers in large numbers. The challenge for review platforms is to give anonymous ratings some of that same accountability. The need keeps growing: Bowker figures reported by Publishers Weekly put self-published output above 3.5 million titles in 2025, each one competing for readers' attention and reviews.

Practical steps

For readers:

• Read the reasons. A review that explains its judgment is more useful than a rating on its own.
• Watch for sudden swings. A burst of extreme ratings around a launch can signal manipulation.
• Check the author. Confirm that a book is listed on the author's own site or by a known publisher.

For authors and publishers:

• Ask for honest reviews. Generalized requests to readers are allowed under the FTC rule.
• Never buy or fake reviews. The Corrain case shows the professional cost, and the FTC rule adds legal exposure.
• Monitor listings. The Friedman case shows the value of checking for books falsely attributed to an author.

A healthier ecosystem

Reviews have not so much lost their way as outgrown their safeguards in sheer volume. The responses since 2023, from Goodreads' moderation commitments to Amazon's disclosure requirement and the FTC rule, show those safeguards being rebuilt. Readers who weigh reasons over numbers, and authors who seek honest responses, help that work along.

For background on how the book trade works, The Publishing Times points readers to The Business of Books: How the International Publishing Industry Really Works.