Goodreads was the future of book reviews. Then Amazon bought it
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I'm sure this is true of nearly all books, bad reviews or not. At least all these reviews are well written and go well beyond the required word count though.
If I didn't know better, I'd suspect there was some kind of industry behind all of this book review nonsense?
https://www.amazon.com/Time-Illusion-Jonathan-Schell/dp/0394...
or one that is obscure but I think significant
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...
(I wrote the only review!). Amazon is probably the best choice in a lot of cases but I’ve got numerous objections to it, if I go to the WorldCat page
https://www.worldcat.org/title/The-time-of-illusion/oclc/184...
I see I can get that book at my Uni library, the public library has it, and so does the other college in town. But Worldcat tells you very little about the book that would motivate you to do so. I used to like Goodreads, but it has gone downhill and it is really AMZN anyway.
Some books have a good Wikipedia page, say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky
but the link to actually get the book sends you this this sad place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-441-0107...
which really will get you to resources like WorldCat and AMZN but it has a huge number of links to low quality resources and is keyed by ISBN which is not good because: (a) ‘old’ books that aren’t that old don’t have ISBN, that Bagdikian book doesn’t, a lot of 1980s books don’t have it and (b) some publishers (South End Press for instance) reuse the same ISBN number for the same book.
I’d really like to see some site that makes good “landing pages” for books that document the book well but also help you get a copy if you want. Maybe something like that would make the pages on demand and make you write a short review.