ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises research undertaken about book reviews. Starting from Gérard Genette’s ideas about the publisher’s peritexts, the chapter outlines the importance of book reviews to the process of purchasing and reading books. This includes the ‘helpfulness’ of Amazon reviews and the use of ratings on Amazon and the socially-mediated Goodreads. This chapter also explores the difference between professional reviews for newspapers and literary magazines, and amateur reviews given online. The question of a text’s literariness is posed. The chapter takes these ideas and samples reviews from professional reviewers and amateur reviewers online. The chapter also undertakes some statistical analysis of Amazon and Goodreads ratings of the twelve hyper-contemporary texts.
