Deleting Reviews. Has Amazon Gone Too Far?

We’ve blogged about the issue of fake reviews on Amazon.com and other sites.  Amazon.com has decided to take action and we applaud them for trying to fix the problem but they might have gone too far.  According to the blog post “Amazon Tackles Review Problem, Deletes Wrong Reviews” Amazon is deleting reviews left by authors for other authors.

This makes no sense to us.  We are authors and we are avid book readers.  All authors are readers.  Naturally, if an author leaves a positive review for a book by a friend without reading the book then that is wrong.  Leaving a positive review for a stinker of a book is wrong too but deleting every author’s review is going to far in our opinion.  What do you think?