[ghaff]

>pay special attention to the two and three star reviews.

I find that's often the case on Amazon as well. On your typical book review, say, there are a lot of 4s or 5s that are gushing praise because it's someone's favored author or genre or whatever. 1s tend to be "It sucked. Read 10 pages and threw it out."

2s and 3s as you say are more likely to be along the lines of "Really tried to like it because it had good ideas and I've liked author X in the past but this book was just too disjoined and confusing to recommend it."

[z0r]

I've found 1 star reviews to be hugely useful on Amazon. Often have seen detailed contrarian 1 star reviews for books that have nearly a 5 star average and found very interesting viewpoints. This works especially well when you're suspicious of the product being a scam - less the case for books, but very useful for other consumer products. The 1 star reviews are where people who received a cheap knock off or something that broke or otherwise failed quickly complain. I like to read the 2 and 3 star reviews as well but there's a similar amount of filtering necessary in my experience.