[ryzvonusef]

But the author is alive and active on Goodreads!

Why not give Authors/Publishers control on adding books and flipping the "book is released" switch?

If Amazon just put a little bit of effort, they could make this into a "goodreads premium" thing and earn money to boot.

Imagine selling input codes for ARC reviewers to be able to input reviews before the book is released for the public; publishers would gladly pay for the privilege, so that when the book is actually available, the top reviews are those of ARC reviewers.

There could be other things Amazon could do, this is just something I thought could earn them money and thus align their incentives with readers. They just need to "care"

[hombre_fatal]

Outside of a few niche scenarios with large authors, I don’t see the upside. And those authors have to care in the first place to keep Goodreads updated else Goodreads has a new problem of being stale since now it’s relying on author activity.

I don’t think this is as trivial as you suggest. Training users to not take “reviews” too seriously seems like a sensible trade off.