Online reviews are not inherently more trustworthy than the marketing copy on the dust jacket. Online reviews can be bought (for very little money). A publisher

Online reviews are not inherently more trustworthy than the marketing copy on the dust jacket. Online reviews can be bought (for very little money). A publisher can easily astroturf the reviews on their books, making it very difficult to establish the quality of a book from online reviews (search is hard when there is a lot of extraneous information). A good book store will provide recommendations (staff picks), which can be pretty spot on. Having an actual person who loves books giving a recommendation is high quality information.