All of that said there may be on the horizon
something like Rotten Tomatoes for the book industry. Looking at the Amazon and blog review of the
ebook-only romantic suspense novel, The
Billionaire’s First Christmas, I did feel I was getting a reliable idea
about how customers at my library might feel about the book. The reviews are not professional in nature,
but they absolutely show that readers in general were enjoying the book even
when they had reservations. The reason I
said that something like Rotten Tomatoes might be on the horizon for books comes
from Amazon itself. Kousha and Thelwall write
specifically about textbooks for sale on Amazon, that “of 1,305 … almost all (96%) had at least one Amazon review” (2016). And this is for textbooks, imagine the reviews
available for popular fiction. This vast
number of reviews and the availability of Amazon sales rankings, etc. could be
aggregated quite easily in the digital medium where they originate and thus,
perhaps, Rotten Tomatoes for books could be born; and I’m not just dreaming. Kousha and Thelwall continue that academic
books are taking a hint from Amazon and considering that instead of relying on
spotty “citation counts (that) are often used to evaluate the research impact
of academic publications,” but that don’t always tell the whole story for “books
that aim at a wide audience inside or outside academia when it is important to capture
the broader impacts of educational or cultural activities,” they are looking at
recommending “metrics based on online reviews … for … evaluation (2016).
I would be very likely to buy The Billionaire’s First Christmas for my
library. It sounds from the “reviews”
that readers are enjoying it, though I don't see the suspense connection, even
in the more professionally written summary from the publisher.
Looking at the reviews for Angela’s Ashes it is interesting to note that several of them point
out the readability of this book by all ages.
This makes me think that McCourt’s book could be broadly accessible and
of good utility for a small collection or any collection at all. The professionalism in the reviews is
convincing in its own way apart from the user reviews for The Billionaires’s First Christmas, but the number of reviews for this
single book does make me wonder if some of these reviewers could have served
readers better by reviewing a book not getting as much attention. If reviewers couldn’t see their way to doing
this for bibliographers at libraries then perhaps for readers who read reviews
for their own personal information.
I do kind of feel that it’s fair that one type of
book is reviewed more than other types. There are certain types of books that many
people enjoy reading that are simply churned out. Looking at the shelf at my library at
Harlequin Romances and the Love Inspired series for example, we get several of
these books a month. The publisher is a
story factory aimed at providing a very specific experience for the reader,
which is great and fine, but reviews of these books may not be super useful or even
substantially different from each other; the dust jacket blurb may simply be
enough. However, a publisher that
releases fewer books a month and of a wider range, books that aim at providing
a more unique and varied experience for their readers, may need to get their
books reviewed more simply because readers aren’t always sure what they’re
going to be getting into. How does this
affect a library’s collection? Well it
certainly has an effect, but I’m not sure it’s as big of one as it might at
first seem. No matter how well-reviewed
a book is (and in my experience a movie) librarians often know whether or not
that item is likely to be popular with their customers. Thus, with standing orders and regular
browsing, reviews, or lack thereof, don’t have to play a huge part in collection
development.
When I started thinking about review sources that
don’t print negative content I actually surprised myself. My intuition was to say if the book’s not
good enough to get a positive review then I don't want to read about it anyway
(at least as a bibliographer/Readers’ Advisor). Here’s the thing, books will always have
their detractors. If I’m buying books
for a collection what I really need to know is why someone liked a book and see
if I think my customers might like it for the same reasons. I don't have time to read negative reviews that
give me little insight into why a book might actually still work for a large group
of people.
Now, I have to admit, I do sometimes find
myself learning as much about an item from its detractors as I do from it
supporters (at least when I read board game reviews), but still negative
criticism for negative’s sake is really quite “counter productive” which is why
it is suggested that “critical judgement” is what is needed (Haigh as cited by
Stinson, 2016), but even this verges on Stinson’s less than efficient and
overly time-consuming "literary provocations" rather than the "informed culturaI recommendations"
that bibliographers really need to do their jobs (2016). Most library collections don’t need to know
if a book is literarily “important,” they need to know if it sounds like
something their customers will check out to read. Lastly, Haigh’s “critical judgment” can
actually become quite formulaic (as cited by Stinson, 2016). I recently read a book by a critic reviewing
the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners up through about 1978. Although I understood much of what the
gentleman was saying and thought much of it absolutely had its merits some of
his observations ascribed to such a cookie cutter idea of “great literature”
that I wondered (as John Updike does in his recommendations for book reviewers)
if the deficiency wasn’t somewhat with the reviewer. As Goldsworthy notes “I try to avoid direct
expressions of evaluation—except in extreme cases, I don’t think the worth of a book
can be confidently quantified” (as cited by Stinson, 2016). Also, as Credaro says,
“Although the elements of a quality book (or other resource) can easily be
articulated, these criteria are no guarantee of a book’s popularity” (2004),
and popularity is often more of the purview of a Readers’ Advisor or
bibliographer than anything else.
When I bought movies for my library I only
indirectly used reviews and this was only half of my calculations. Personally, I don’t rely on reviews for my
personal reading. I generally like lists
that represent a consensus accumulated over time. And this isn’t always because I want to be sure
I’m getting something that is actually “the best” but because, like the
anthropologist, a list gives me a window into what people of a certain time thought
of as “the best,” which I think is a much more interesting question.
That said, I hope to someday re-subscribe to The New York Review of Books. I read that publication for a few years and
learned a lot about authors I’d never heard of or only in passing and I learned
a lot of other things as well about conversations going on in politics,
science, and the world in general.
Works Cited:
Stinson, E.
(2016). How Nice Is Too Nice? Australian Book Reviews and the 'Compliment
Sandwich'. Australian Humanities Review, (60), 108-126.
Kousha, K.,
& Thelwall, M. (2016). Can Amazon.com reviews help to assess the wider
impacts of books? Journal Of The Association For Information Science &
Technology, 67(3), 566-581.
Credaro, A.
(2004). Walking Through the Valley of the Shadow of Happy Talk: Book Reviews
and Collection Development. Library Media Connection, 23(3), 51.
