[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.