[larsberg]

I haven't gotten any direct numbers from them, but the authors of technical books that I've talked to have told me that your Amazon sales are proportional to the number of reviews, not the rating associated with the product. They claim that just getting more reviews is important and always worth comping review copies to people you know will write a review, even if they are not all 4/5-star reviews.

If I had to guess, most people only click on items with high numbers of reviews, read the "top 3 most useful," and then make their purchase decision from those, rather than the long tail of rants from either the easily-bribed or disillusioned masses. These voters may inadvertently be steering people to the Kindle version by inflating the number of reviews associated with it over the hardcover.

[Tichy]

Hm, sounds more likely to me that they got it backwards - if a book is "popular", not as in liked but as in featured in many pop contexts like TV and newspaper reviews, it will also receive more reviews, because more people will have bought it.

[alex_c]

Yes and no... just as a single data point, my behavior tends to be to look for the "popular" technical references and choose from those. If a book has a small number of excellent reviews, I probably won't choose that over a book with a large number of average-to-good reviews.

I'm not arguing this is rational, just something I noticed myself doing - if others are the same, I can see a feedback loop where more reviews lead to more purchases.