The good news is that you don't need to read all the books, because many bogus reviews tend to be written by the same "customers". Simply seeing a correlation of bad books getting good reviews, would result in those "customers" losing their ranking power from their reviews.
What's bad (really bad) here, is that not only are the books that are being ranked highly absolute crap, but they are crap in different categories. I.E. A "book" on swift, that was apparently "written", in a few hours, shoved onto Amazon, falsely ranked up - now ranks ahead of a 700 page opus on Perl, in the Perl category.
That's a total fail on Amazon's part, and really, really disappointing.
I don't find it at all surprising, however. Amazon can't even manage a half-decent search across the products they carry. I have this feeling that somewhere in Amazon, it has been decreed that the search and the rankings and everything else must be filtered through the same system that generates recommendations. You search for "4TB hard drive" and the 8th search result is a 3TB drive. Their site skips over much more relevant items apparently because the items are more strongly 'related' in terms of purchase history or browsing history or something. I expect exactly that kind of system is what is being gamed in these circumstances.
When it comes to reviews, the correct answer is that every user should have their tastes profiled and compared against the tastes of other users, with only users whose tastes in other areas counting strongly. I could easily imagine that this sort of thing might be difficult for Amazon to implement, though, depending on their infrastructure.
What's bad (really bad) here, is that not only are the books that are being ranked highly absolute crap, but they are crap in different categories. I.E. A "book" on swift, that was apparently "written", in a few hours, shoved onto Amazon, falsely ranked up - now ranks ahead of a 700 page opus on Perl, in the Perl category.
That's a total fail on Amazon's part, and really, really disappointing.