Community Discussion: On Reviews

[musesong]

Here is another of the occasional community discussion posts. We were wondering how community members felt about print and on-line book reviews? These could be the professional ones generated by writers who are paid to review books or those reviews and ratings put up by readers on book selling sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, on review blogs

Comments

[lecari]

Wow, that looks very fishy. I'd not heard of that happening before, although I did sometimes consider that Amazon might remove bad reviews, just because lots of bad reviews doesn't sell books - but I had hoped that authors would be a little more realisic. Not everyone will enjoy a book, as has been said. I will definitely be a bit more careful from now on.

I find reviews very helpful in deciding on a book, either from here (when people post a rating) or sites such as librarything.com (which has a review function). Sometimes I'll read reviews on the paper, but I don't buy newspapers/magazines often so generally I rely on internet reviews. I prefer LJ etc though because it's more personal, and you get much more variety than you do in a magazine etc. I also prefer reviews that are at least a paragraph long, rather than just one or two lines, and I don't like plot spoilers but a little bit about what the book is about is helpful! I also like it when reviewers mention other books or authors it's similar to, so you can get an idea of whether you'd enjoy it too.