A substantial problem with malicious book reviews at Amazon.com and
their sister sites is that they constitute suppression of free speech in
the name of free speech.
David Streitfeld has the story at The New York Times in A Casualty on the Battlefield of Amazon’s Partisan Book Reviews.
What
makes these attacks even more malicious is that the book review posters
are often anonymous, have often not even read the books in question, and are posting only because they are primarily interested in suppressing contrary views to their own.
Suppression of contrary opinion is quite rampant in archaeology and studies of the ancient world.
People think it is fine to make jokes about lawyers, because attorneys are so successful professionally and monetarily that criticism runs off their backs like water from ducks, but archaeologists e.g. are not used to criticism of any kind, because in the past, people have never looked closely at the work that archaeologists do or have done. When that work is examined carefully, it is obvious to anyone that much is false and that there is much to be improved.
Getting that message through to (and against the opposition of) the lobby of the ancient world academic community is easier said than done.