"I like to hit the largest audience I possibly can and Amazon is the largest site," said Klausner, Amazon's most prolific reviewer. "The online experience has more readers to get reviews and it's more accessible."

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While online reviewers like Klausner aren't nearly as well known as Oprah, they may still wield significant influence in the publishing world.

"She reaches more readers than most book reviewers because she's seen by thousands of people," said Steve Gordon, founder of AllReaders.com. "I think she has more reach than many of the top newspapers."

Like Klausner, a legion of book enthusiasts, freelance writers, doctors, lawyers and other professionals have volunteered their opinions and advice to sites like BarnesandNoble.com, Amazon.com, AllReaders.com and AllExperts.com.

Who are these reviewers and self-proclaimed experts who contribute thousands of entries to e-commerce and community websites, with little payback or recognition?

Klausner, for one, has a day job to supplement her income. She works as a paid columnist in two national magazines, Porthole Cruise Magazine and Affaire de Coeur.

For her, unpaid online reviews are a labor of love.

"I'd rather be doing this than get paid," she said. "What do I have to gain, but the love of doing it?"

Klausner, who has more than 3,000 reviews on Amazon.com, writes about two reviews a day across all different genres. She tries to establish trust with readers by following a strict set of rules for herself. She never deliberately criticizes an author and she doesn't accept gifts or money when writing about a book.

On Amazon.com, customers who write the most helpful reviews are deemed top reviewers.

Klausner is also the top reviewer on AllReaders.com. While she submits many of the same entries to Amazon.com, she takes extra time to evaluate a book for AllReaders.com because "she sees the value of categorizing books by these systems," Gordon said.

AllReaders.com reviewers complete a seven-page form evaluating elements of plot, theme, character, setting and structure in a book, so customers can search by these categories. The site rates its top reviewers based upon the number of reviews for a particular author that are accepted.

The higher the score, the more people trust a reviewer, said Gordon, who also created AllExperts.com (a free online Q&A service, which he sold to About.com).

Sites like AllExperts.com and AllReaders.com, which rely upon volunteers, must provide a service that is unique, high quality and interesting to reviewers, Gordon said.

Prestige also lures unpaid advice-givers to contribute their expertise. Volunteers are called "experts" on AllExperts.com and "scholars" on AllReaders.com.

AllExperts.com has recruited more than 40,000 people over three years, while AllReaders.com has recruited more than 20,000 unpaid reviewers over two years.

There are plenty of sites where contributors can get paid for their work, however.

ForeWordreviews.com will professionally review books for a fee. Any publisher or author can buy a review through the site for $295.

Advice sites like Epinions.com and About.com pay experts based on how popular their reviews are.

Unlike these sites, community sites like Readerville.com feature informal, unpaid reviews that are part of general discourse by regular members. The site doesn't rank reviewers like Amazon.com and AllReaders.com.

Since Readerville participants tend to know each other's tastes and preferences, they often trust one another's opinions more than they would trust an unfamiliar New York Times critic, or an uncredentialed reviewer on Amazon.com, said Karen Templer, founder of Readerville.com.

Some, like Templer, question whether reviews make it easier for readers to search through the mass of available titles.

While newspapers across the country are cutting back on reviews, sites like Amazon.com continue to amass online reviews.

"I don't think that most people give any weight to those reviews," Templer said. "It's not a huge factor in the way that people at Readerville find and purchase books."

"If reviews are as ubiquitous and uneven as books are, then what purpose do reviews serve?" Templer said.

However, many say that online reviews cover literature that isn't reviewed by mainstream print publications.

"There are a lot of reviews out there on the top 2-to-3 percent of titles on the New York Times bestseller list," Gordon said. "But you can never have a resource that has all reviews of all books."

But what's to prevent one person from trying to boost a book's rating by posting reviews under different names?

While posting under multiple names would lower a scholar's total score on AllReaders.com, at sites like BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com, "there would be an incentive to submit under multiple names," Gordon said.

Klausner said that posting under multiple names takes too much time to be worth the effort.

"It's too much work," she said. "You have to be really dedicated to do this."

The Internet does provide instant accountability for those who are dedicated enough to contribute regularly, as Klausner can attest with her newfound recognition.