Week 5 Prompt

Instinctively, in this conversation about book reviews, I felt that if a book is not getting reviewed there is almost no conversation around it, which means a major compromise to the book's publicity and its chances of being picked up by buyers.  The more I thought about this, though, I began to wonder how anyone buying books for any size library really has time to read that many reviews.  (From talking to my co-workers I have come to understand that some publications do use a point-based rating system to give a quick overview of a book, but still).  I used to buy DVDs for my small branch library and I never read reviews.  What I did do was look at the review aggregator website, Rotten Tomatoes, to get a feel for not only how "critics" were responding but also how "fans" were responding to a certain movie.  I didn't stop there, though.  I would also look at the box office sales for every movie to gauge public interest.  I found that if a movie didn't make over 30 million dollars in national theaters it probably wasn't going to circulate well at our library.  I found that if it made around 200 million dollars I had better buy two copies.  This was a fairly efficient and quick way for me to evaluate the feasibility of purchasing every movie each year and even that took a lot of time.  Now the book industry doesn't seem to have anything quite like Rotten Tomatoes or the convenient delay between theatrical release and DVD release that allows an aggregator like Rotten Tomatoes and theatrical sales data to work the way it does for movies.  What the book industry does have is publisher reputation and standing orders.  This makes me wonder if this balances out the "collection development" issue lack of reviews for certain genres, etc. would seem to create.  Perhaps reading a list of titles with blurbs is sufficient for many of the books a library might purchase throughout the year.  The book has already been vetted by a publisher that has a reputation for producing the sorts of books your customers enjoy reading and if the publisher is "featuring" the book on some sort of list they are clearly willing to stake their reputation on it to some degree.  In fact, professional critical review might actually gum up the works.  As Stinson writes "informed cultural recommendations" are really what many of us are after rather than "literary provocations" (2016).  A publisher is well-placed to make "informed cultural recommendations" through its catalog, a publication that is designed to make them a buck by making readers happy with content readers like.  Intense literary criticism, well, it tends to alienate people and there's simply not much money in it.

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.