Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated

Goodreads is the worst. At this point, Amazon should just shut it down.

Amazon reviews are unironically better, because you can see if somebody actually bought the book or not, and Amazon has very sophisticated anti-Astroturfing measures. (Good luck getting your friends and family to leave good reviews of your book -- they'll catch it and delete them.)

Goodreads is infested with marketing and publishing cliques and a lot of their reviews are fake or paid for. It has never been more over.

Do you trust Amazon to be honest and accurate about who bought the product?

I buy lots of books and write lots of reviews on Amazon, and mine always say "verified purchase." I also see other reviews which were solicited by giving readers free copies (ARCs) a la Goodreads, and they never say "verified purchase." (And some reviews that were written by people who never read the book at all...) So yeah. Unless you have evidence to the contrary -- which would be evidence of a crime -- I think they can be trusted on this point.

>Amazon has very sophisticated anti-Astroturfing measures.

And yet they won't do anything about sellers who change their listing to a completely different product once it gets to the 4-5 star range. Can't tell you how many times I've been looking at some tool or gadget only to glance at the reviews and see people mentioning socks.

Amazon is packed full of fake reviews.

They just catch some of the easily detectable ones that some authors use (everyone following the same link or links from the same site rating books universally high, for instance).

They don't detect commercial review buying services which involve actual product purchases nearly as well or some of the other scams like ASIN laundering.

All one needs to do is look at 100% identical white labeled products that get vastly different reviews to see Amazon's measures are wholly insufficient.

Worse, people buy 4-5 star good reviews for their own products and 1-3 star bad reviews for competing products, so there's no easy way for a user to tell what is real and what is fake.

Goodreads is the only real (popular) review site for non-american books too. If Amazon doesn't sell lithuanian books, how can I review those there? :)

I wholeheartedly agree that Amazon needs to fix how they handle product reviews in general. For a lot of non-book products, their system is totally broken. But for book reviews in particular, as bad as it is, it's better than whatever Goodreads is doing.

Amazon, like all review sites, can be gamed. But it takes quite a lot of effort, and credible fake reviews need to actually purchase the book in question -- and so, for the average book, fake reviews are practically a non-factor.

Goodreads is trivially easy to manipulate, and it's manipulated as a matter of course. Anybody with $45 can simply buy 10 Goodreads reviews. https://alphabetazone.com/buy-goodreads-reviews/