photo © 2009 Shannon Archuleta | more info (via: Wylio)I love books. I can’t say I take enough time to read these days, but I still compulsively buy more books. I have tottering towers of tomes all around my apartment, plus multiple book shelves and cases dedicated mostly to fiction, some nonfiction.
Knowing that publishers pay to put their authors’ new books front and center on “new and noteworthy” tables or shelves with “new fiction hardcovers,” I frequently turn to online book reviews to decide if I should go ahead and buy,particularly if I’m moved enough to want to buy it brand new. I always take a sheet of paper with me to bookstores to jot down titles that sound interesting. At home I have a running list of about 400 titles that piqued my interest at some point, books which I have not yet purchased.
When I’m itching to make a purchase, I check up on that book’s rating on Amazon. Do reviewers pretty consistently give the same ratings or are ratings all over the place? Do the glowing or shattering reviews sound like the person actually read the book? Have enough people reviewed it that I can give weight to the overall rating? It’s not the most reliable system. I’ve bought books that have had multiple glowing reviews, only to be tossing the book in the BookMooch pile before hitting page 100.
The fact of the matter is that reviews sell books.
Qualitative research affirms that “books with more and better reviews sell better,” according to Cornell sociologists Shay David and Dr. Trevor Pinch, co-authors of a 2006 analysis of online recommendation systems. (Garth Risk Hallberg’s “Who is Grady Harp? Amazon’s Top Reviewers and the fate of the literary amateur“)
What Amazon reviews are missing is the relevancy of reviews. When looking at film reviews on Netflix, you are aware of how closely your film tastes mirror the reviewer based on how each party rates films. If JoeMovie has an 80% similarity to me, I’m much more likely weight his review favorably in my decision to queue than JaneMovie, who I just have a 35% review rating in common with. On Amazon I have no clue if the guy proclaiming a book to be the greatest work of literature ever read has ever picked up a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Saramago’s Blindness.
Hallberg goes on to discuss some of the top reviewers
Harriet Klausner, No. 1 since the inception of the ranking system in 2000, has averaged 45 book reviews per week over the last five years—a pace that seems hard to credit, even from a professed speed-reader.
As a prospective book buyer, I can’t take her opinion very seriously. What kind of depth of experience can she have reading and reviewing 45 books in full each week. What kind of recall does she have? A great book is a love affair that you just don’t want to end. How can you be captivated and swept away by anything if you read 6 books or more a day?
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