But gosh, what a spammable resource. I can just see every book on any political or philosophical topic full of references to Chomsky's and Gingrich's latest... entertaining as it is to imagine something written by both of them, I am actually thinking of more likely duelling spams. Euck.
I don't think anyone wants to provide server space for that. Amazon does the moderation necessary to prune it, but (leaving out questions of who owns the review) Amazon is not good at things not for sale. Besides, any centralized and corporate entity would be susceptible to censorship or greed.
I think an intermediate database would make me happy enough; some reasonably global bibliography, legally copiable, with some grand smarts to lump and split as users want. (Sometimes I want to know that these-three-reviews are of different printings of the same text: sometimes not.)
And then all the cleverness of reputation servers might come into it; I could tell my Reader's Agent that I liked reviews by these six people, and wanted, every week, to see twelve fiction reviews and twelve nonfiction reviews, starting with them and working outward through the circles of trust. For that matter, I'd like to see the commentary by these other four people who I despise... one of the most likely uses of reputation services, it seems to me; the Holy Rollers and the Rock-and-Rollers are likely to use each others' recommendations, only inverted.
In this case, I am thinking of the (Dublin Core or something like) database as providing an intelligent ID, along with help in finding a copy of the work. Instead of references to references to a book, references to copies of it: available for sale, scanning, download, rental, borrowing with such-a library privilege. I drool at the thought.
So wrote clew in
Meta.
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