Let me do my job quickly and direct you to this inter­view that Avon Edi­tor May Chen and VP/Executive Edi­tor Lucia Macro recently did at All About Romance. It is quite insight­ful. I espe­cially loved this part:

May Chen: In my opin­ion, the online world still doesn’t have much impact on sales as, anec­do­tally, I’ve seen books get hor­ri­ble online reviews but have done well. As far as I know, we still don’t include online reviews on our books, but that can cer­tainly change if we see them start mak­ing a dif­fer­ence. Right now, the best endorse­ments for us still seem to be from NYT best­selling authors and from major tra­di­tional print reviewers.

Lucia Macro: Do the con­sumers rec­og­nize the source of the quote? I’m not sure that the vast major­ity of read­ers rec­og­nize all the online sites. When check­ing their rank­ings I’m often sur­prised at how lit­tle traf­fic they really get. We are all very plugged in, but many casual read­ers are just pick­ing up a book at their local Wal­mart and barely have time to watch tv, much less wres­tle the com­puter away from their kids. So an author quote might carry more weight with them.

I actu­ally own an iPhone and pre­fer ebooks to paper but YMMV.

But as SarahT concluded:

I’m delighted Avon feel com­fort­able in per­pet­u­at­ing their out­dated mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Given Harper­Collins widely reported losses and lay­offs this year, it’s obvi­ously work­ing out for them.

Yes, why fix what isn’t broken?

Update: must attribute this link dis­cov­ery to @jane_l from Dea­r­Author. I left my com­ment at the AAR site.