Comments on: Can’t truss it

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:31:05 +0000

Hi, As far as reviewing goes, it is much easier to see the negatives in life than the positives. However, why would “most” reviewers bother reviewing anything below three stars? While some reviewers enjoy reviewing books in a negative fashion, there does seem to be a place for reviewers who enjoy promoting their favorite books, movies and CDs. Which is what many of the Amazon about-you-areas show. The only time I really love reading negative reviews is when I absolutely disliked a movie. It is great for a laugh. I’ve found that the reviews at Amazon are much more trustworthy unless they are an obvious attack on the author. At times, I love buying a book just to see if it “really” is that bad. So, I figure negative reviews also help sell books in a big way. Mostly, I find how you view an Amazon review has more to do with YOU personally than with how the reviews are written. If you tend to be a more positive person, then you will agree more with the positive reviews. If you are more negative, you might tend to enjoy the negative reviews and relate more to those aspects. I’m somewhere in the middle. I take both sides of the picture and try to form an opinion of the reviews in that manner. If you have been reading Amazon reviews for a couple of years, you learn to weed out the unhelpful ones and take the helpful ones more seriously. So far, I’ve found the reviews at Amazon to be very helpful and may Amazon.com rule the web forever! Power to the people ;) ~TheRebeccaReview.com P.S. I think your reasons for why conservative books have a lower average (I can’t verify that due to my own time constraints), could be because liberals tend to be more active in reviewing books they disagree with than conservatives? In my limited years online, I’ve met far more liberals online than conservatives. All my “liberal” friends are also great at writing. For some reason they tend to be more creative. At least the friends I’ve met online excel in those areas. So maybe that helps answer your question. P.S. II My mother wants me to read: “Unfounded Loyalty” by Wayne Perryman. P.S. III You will find that if you can find books that you love and you can review them in a positive manner, authors will appreciate the fact that you found their “gem.” I love finding books I absolutely can give 5 stars to because those are the books worthy of extensive and well-thought out reviews. Anything below a three star rating is going to be a book I’m not really interested in to begin with.

By: jFrog

jFrog — Sun, 14 Sep 2003 16:21:08 +0000

One of the neat features of being an Amazon reviewer is that Amazon provides a chat group caller ‘Customer Reviews’ where you can buddy up and join a not very secret group who votes for each others reviews. It seems that reviewers are more intent on raising their rank than in actually writing good reviews. Keep in mind when you read a review with a lot of positives that there are good odds the reviewer cheated.

By: Jim Allan

Jim Allan — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 18:19:58 +0000

I haven’t done many reviews at amazon.com. But today I received an email from the publisher of a version of a book I reviewed favorably a couple of years ago offering me a free copy if I would review the new version for amazon.com. Is this perhaps now common practice in the industry? Are some prolific reviewers at amazon.con simply giving good reviews of every free book provided to them by a publisher?

By: bry

bry — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 11:35:36 +0000

I have to say that your analysis of amazon’s helpfulness is not very useful either. The classification bad books pretty much invalidates the whole thing. I don’t think I’d trust the classification system though, as I can’t think of many instances where I would rate. Only if I bought the book on amazon would I feel any reason to go back and rate it, I would however only be impelled to rate a book in extreme circumstances, if I thought it was brilliant, or if I thought it was absolute dreck. I would also be tempted to negatively rate works that I thought were being overrated. I suppose that if I ever rated a book on amazon I would be a corrective to overvaluation system, but as I never do I am not. sad really.

By: bernie

bernie — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 00:55:17 +0000

The article is somewhat negative. With all the insight and understanding of the reviewing mechanics, it should make extrapolating useful information from the review possible irrelevant of the surface ratings.

By: Bernie

Bernie — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 00:53:53 +0000

understanding of the reviewing mechanics, it should make extrapolating useful information from the review possible irrelevant of the surface ratings.

By: Shai

Shai — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 00:00:51 +0000

I agree with g.deedee. you’ll have to read the comments to get a sense of anything. At least on Amazon. The tomatometer rating at rottentomatoes works because theres a selection process that determines who will or will not be included as a reviewer. But if you don’t match the demographic of the average movie critic they might be a little off (I tend to agree with ebert 80% of the time—but never when he’s trying to channel a 14 year old). In my experience imdb scores aren’t all that bad with exception to some subcultures such as “japanese animation” where hackneyed tripe will receive a quite decent score. For most movies with a few thousand ratings you can break down the score for specific demographics like sex and age to get a better idea. But in general I think the comments are a more accurate way to judge; however, I don’t restrict myself to comments that are on amazon, I also do a google search for ‘”book title” review’, look for newspaper reviews, check the scholarly indexes if it’s a monograph, whatever. re technical books, I wonder whether the ratings are more accurate than the average review as some have suggested. I notice many reviews by people who rate a book one star simply because they didn’t understand it. eg. they’re reading “physics for people who actually know calculus”, when they should be reading “physics for communication majors: what you should have learned in high school”. I see the same pattern in student evaluations for courses that don’t have rigorous prerequisites: 50% of the students will write that the professor is a bad lecturer and the course was quite hard when all of the material is elementary, if not utterly simplistic if you bother to pay attention and do the readings/problem sets/etc.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 20:18:28 +0000

I agree that most people post positive reviews…I am an Amazon reviewer (for music) and I do myself. Basically, if I were a professional reviewer there are a ton of CDs I might be assigned that I think are really bad. But I am not a professional, and so I’d rather spend my time promoting music that I feel passionate about rather than tearing down crappy music….after all, what’s the point of giving Britanny Spears a bad review. You won’t change anybody’s mind. But a positive review of some out of the way jazz artist or avant-garde musician, might inspire the adventurous to buy more out of the way albums, thus helping the artist and the art in general. Also, the average ratings on mainstream books, CDs and such are pretty useless, but less so I think on less frequently reviewed material.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 20:16:54 +0000

As an Amazon reviewer, I’d like to agree with what most people are saying. I review books I’ve read and music and DVD I enjoy. Guess what, if I’ve bought it and invested time into it, chances are that I think I’ll like it before I even start it. And usually I’m right. So almost all of my reviews are 4 or 5 star reviews. I have found the best way to see if I really will enjoy something is see what else the person has reviewed. If they have tastes similar to mine, odds are I’d feel the same way about it they did. This is why someone who writes lots of reviews is more helpful in selling what they review then someone who only reviews one author.

By: B

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 19:58:06 +0000

My impression is that the Amazon rating system works well for technical books. Somebody who bought a book to learn something from it and found the book to be useless, outdated, erroneous, etc. is likely to make the effort to give it a bad review. It’s actually quite useful when selecting among the many books on, say, Java Server Pages or XML.

By: Tom Andersen

Tom Andersen — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 19:14:57 +0000

I’m happy to say that my book got a 5-star rating. But then again only one person reviewed it.

By: sara

sara — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 18:50:42 +0000

the accumulated reviews of a political polemic make the average blog look like the Algonquin Round Table. Then what do the reviews of the accumulated reviews of a political polemic look like? I'm not going to concede Chomsky as a "bad" author, though I will concede Lenin because of the unhappy history of Soviet Communism. I'd like to know whether the customer reviews system at Amazon is automatic, so that when a leftist book accumulates a huge number of negative reviews by right-wingers, this merely reflects raw input, not moderation by Amazon. If right-wingers' books (take Slander and Treason by Ann Coulter, very bad books) don't accumulate massive numbers of negative reviews by leftists, is this due to raw input or moderation by Amazon? Since I saw the "Deck of Weasels" advertised on howstuffworks.com, a site with excessive product placement for an "info" site, I have been allergic to political bias in websites that supposedly offer neutral info or services.

By: Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 18:35:39 +0000

To Xhenxhefil, re: Hesse and Boll. Those are two of my favorite authors, and I’ve read everything published by either in English. I don’t know exactly what your tastes are, but I’d recommend starting out with Boll’s short stories, which are excellent and which span his whole career. (His career can roughly be divided into two sections—the darker works about the war and the immediate post war, and the more satirical works about the later prosperity.) I think his best novel is Billiards at Half Past Nine, which also spans themes from both periods, although it’s also probably his most difficult. Group Portrait with Lady is a great novel but is also rather long and slightly odd in its narration, so I can see why it got some poor reviews. On Hesse, I’d start with Demian, then Steppenwolf, then Peter Camenzind (an early novel that doesn’t get much attention but is very nice.) On this, I agree that the Glass Bead Game is probably the worst of his major novels.

By: markus

markus — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 18:22:34 +0000

what’s wrong with the Manson book? i read that during my internship at a forensic psychiatric clinic. It was useless, but what makes it a bad book? Just curious.

By: Ted Barlow

Ted Barlow — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 17:36:15 +0000

i. I didn’t calculate SDs, but maybe I’ll update with them later. I suspect that they’ll be relatively small. ii. I agree. iii. I’ve linked to the books I rated. Here’s what I used as bad books: 11 Septembre 2001 : L’effroyable imposture (9/11: The Big Lie) 5 Inside the Third Reich (by Albert Speer) 4.5 White Power 4.5 The Satanic Bible 4 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (by V. Lenin) 4 Manson in his own words 4 9/11 by Noam Chomsky 4 The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion 4 Chariots of the Gods? 3.5 Coming of Age in Samoa 3.5 International Jew (by Henry Ford) 3.5 Before the Dawn: An Autobiography by Gerry Adams 3 So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? By Lyndon Larouche 3 DOW 36,000 2.5