[hardcastle]

From the article:

Here at Barnes & Noble, just as with Amazon, best-selling indie content is better rated on average than best-selling traditionally published content. Our initial speculation about price correlating to average review score has since been disproven by others, who looked at our data more closely. We may be left with the conclusion that self-published works are outselling every other publisher by dint of readers simply liking them better.

I think this is jumping to a conclusion too soon. Readers may be reviewing the books with a bias in effect in favor of self-published books, or rate them higher due to surprise in quality of content, for example. I don't think we can make a connection between high ratings and high sales in this case.

The second issue is that indie authors writing in the romance and erotica genres have reported suppressed ranking due to the covers or content of their works.

I had no idea this occurred, but it makes sense. Most other marketplaces would say, "get that content somewhere else" if it becomes a visibility issue, but eReader-tied stores have to maintain the front that they are the end-all-be-all store. Why complain about DRM and lock-in when you don't need to go anywhere else? Too bad there's a huge erotica market that your company may not want to associate with...so they push it to the back of their store and assume the stream of users who want it will find it.