You’re right, the book reviews can resemble a heated online forum sometimes.

The come with an agenda, sometimes even admit the haven’t read the book, and the review is all about attacking the point of view of the author (or perceived point of view) without discussing the actual book.

Then more reviews come in attacking the negative review and then come in the fake reviews from India (yes, there is black hat Amazon Optimization).

Yuck!

Converesely, perhaps instead of explicitly asking reviewers what else they would recommend, the system could just automatically show what that reviewer has highly-rated (e.g. show books that were rated 4-5 stars by this reviewer and that fall into this same genre).

I like this idea! Amazon.com developers who might be reading this post, go forth and make it so.

This is more of a specific usability question than a general eCommerce question, but what would the UI for the “What would you recommend instead?” field look like — how would it work?

- Would it be a text field that the user could paste in the URL to an item at Amazon.com, from which Amazon would extract the item’s ID?

- Would it be a richer interface which opens up a popup window with an Amazon search interface, which the user could then use to search for the item they want to link to, and click on the item in the search results to select it?

- Or something else?