Cicero was a wise dude.
The problem with relying on established authorities is the establishment is by its very nature backwards-looking; it relies on past experience to judge the present. This works fine with slow-changing or even paralyzed areas but useless in fast moving, evolving, living areas.
Book review publications?
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they are all-wise, all-knowing, totally unbiased. (Hey, it could happen... in some alternate universe.)
How many titles can they review? 100 a month? 200?
In 2006, the UK, US, Canada, and Australia saw 400,000 new books published.
And that is pre-Kindle, pre-ebook mainstreaming, pre-legitimitization of ebooks.
Even a conservative estimate is going to leave us with well north of half a million new books a year. (Less conservative but more likely is going to be closer to a million.)
And the authoritative reviewers will be looking at, maybe, a few thousand?
5%, maybe?
How useful is that?
Are we to limit our reading choices to the 5% they deem significant enough to look at?
Especially when, faced with that reality, the authoritative reviewers' first kneejerk reaction was to exclude all self-published titles from consideration and that it takes well-nigh an act of god to get them to consider a title from a small, new publishing venture.
The quality of their reviews may be outstanding and a work of art all unto itself but if they're not reviewing the books you're considering, those reviews are going to be useless to you.
Crowd-sourced reviews may not be authoritative but for most titles a consumer encounters there is nothing else. This isn't populism. (That is something entirely different and purely political.) It isn't pandering to the lowest common denominator or reverse-snobbbery; it is simple *marketplace* reality.
Crowd-sourced reviews is simply the only game in town for now.
Relying solely on authoritative reviews these days meaning ignoring 90% of the available titles and only looking at high-visibility content from a handful of traditional publishers. It means, to put it in terms the established authorities might relate to, not "being where its at".
The center of gravity of publishing is moving away from the establishment.
From the cozy "everybody knows everybody" salons to the streets.
Because publishing is a business and in business follows the money. And in the wake of the ebook evolution the money is scattering.
The traditionalists bemoan that "bestsellers" just aren't selling as much as they used to and they are right. Because the consumers are no longer penned in and force-fed a small list of books to choose from and they are instead choosing other things to read. Things no authoritative source can keep track of, much less review.
Hey, even "less authoritative" web-based genre-focused review sites are unable to keep track of everything or even most of their chosen genres, why would anybody expect more "thoughtful" and "more insightful" reviewers to be able to keep up?
At this point, authoritative reviewers have ceased to be useful comparison-shopping tools; they are merely recommendation tools. The best they can do is recommend titles that fit their criteria so that people that share and value their criteria will know those titles exist. A useful and valid service. If you have no interest in the other 95% of the new titles hitting the market this year.
Crowd-sourced reviews are a lot like democracy; they are the worst way to find good books to read, except for all the other ways.
It is an imperfect, flawed system but it is the only one that, so far, even aspires at full market coverage.
Until somebody comes up with something better, we just have to make do.