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It would be nice if a "trusted reviews website" or three came along and gave people a reasonable list of places to go to find out about good books. Of course, once such a place gets established, it gets mobbed by authors seeking to have their books reviewed, and soon you end up with the "gated community" problem of not being able to get reviewed by the Good Guys.
In a way, it's not much different than the old "slush pile" problem of getting noticed... we've just swapped a publishing slush pile for a reviewing slush pile.
But my biggest concern is whether the review process is still working, especially with such a wider range of books and a further-reaching audience. Reviews tend to favor a particular mind-set, that of the reviewer; and if your readers are all of a similar mind-set, that works well. But when readers are from different countries, have different cultural preferences and expectations, different levels of acceptable quality or expected memes, etc, it would seem the "major media reviewer" may lose mind-share to more genre- and culture-specific reviewers.
In other words, Roger Ebert is losing mind-share to Cowboy Bob, Joe Starfracker, James Bondage, the Stig and Vampirella.
I suspect it will take some time before consumers manage to find their trusted reviewers, and the reviewers manage to review a significant number of books, to make the whole system really tick.
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