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I don't tend to read professional reviews; when I do, it's primarily to find out what the book is about, more than for the reviewer's opinion. If a book has a lot of bad reviews on Amazon, I might decide not to buy it - but what's most important to me is the description and the sample. (It bewilders me when a book has no description, and instead only has a bunch of glowing endorsements from other authors. I don't care how many authors recommend it, I'm not going to buy it if I don't know what it's about!)
With all reviews, both professional and Amazon-style, the main problem is that I have no idea whether the reader's taste in books matches mine; someone could hate a book because it's depressing (while I like dark and grim books) or love it for its literary style (while I don't like literary fiction). That's why I tend to find negative reviews more helpful than positive ones, especially on places like Amazon; they often give more detail about the book than the positive reviews do. I've bought books in the past based on one-star Amazon reviews because the things that made the reviewers hate the books were things that I love.
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