The Sword and Laser discussion

David wrote: "I don't think anyone will ever convince Goodreads to take itself more seriously as a catalog vs. a social media site, but we can nibble around the edges.)
..."
Oh I agree. All of this is really just a fun discussion, I don't expect anything at all to change. I do think GR is being irresponsible toward new and mid-market authors by ignoring some of this, especially by allowing pre-publication ratings (Arc aside) but... they've been doing that for years.

I find this whole discussion fascinating. That's primarily because Amazon's book rating system exists primarily to help sell more books. Goodreads is owned by Amazon and its purpose to Amazon is to help it sell more books. And perhaps to sell advertising, but primarily books. So the entirety of the rating system exists to sell more books. Any social or personal good it provides is secondary.

As for myself, I use reviews primarily as a guide to a book's popularity. The number of reviews is a proxy for how many people have read it. Beyond that I'll read the description, check out the author's bio and other works, and make a decision.

Well, Amazon didn't buy Goodreads until 2013, 7 years after it was it was founded.

It was actually a pain in the butt before it was bought in one particular way--the manual for Goodreads librarians didn't allow us to use covers from Amazon.com, so it was sometimes a chore to find a good image to use for the book pages. Thankfully they changed aspect when they got corporatized, but I'm going way off topic...

David wrote: "It was actually a pain in the butt before it was bought in one particular way--the manual for Goodreads librarians didn't allow us to use covers from Amazon.com, so it was sometimes a chore to find a good image to use for the book pages."

Yeah I remember those rules. It was really hard to find some stuff when you were banned from using Amazon.

Sean wrote: "Rick wrote: "The other issue with this is that no matter how one person uses the system, they're all averaged into the single, aggregate score we see on a book's page and those differences in meani..."

This is cool the main issue is that what is good by rating changes depending on the genre.

Political books are all over the place and depend basically on the authors loved/hated ratio and the books quality.

Or for within our own genres, Epic Fantasy will always get better reviews/ratings than Urban Fantasy or Sci-fi.

That Patrick Rothfuss review is hilarious. But he was lucky. There must be other authors who experience the reverse, getting one stars before their books are even published. I am in the Goodreads feedback group and read some years ago about the plea to stop/disallow users to rate and review books unless they have an ARC. I wonder if it is still being considered or totally rejected (like they did with the 0.5 rating)

Rick wrote: "Which is why I said that people should have to check an "I have an ARC" checkbox to review before it's released (was in an earlier comment). That wouldn't stop everyone but the extra speed bump will filter some of those people who click stars for whatever reason when they haven't read the book."

I agree, an "I have an ARC/early review copy" checkbox would help filter many frivolous reviews. Sorry that I missed your earlier comment!

here's a comparison of 5-star ratings systems for Goodreads, Amazon and a few more



The Netflix and Youtube ratings have been retired. The iTunes ratings still exist but are on the way out?

as noted in previous comments, there is a problematic difference between Goodreads and Amazon

lotta hate in some of the ratings

I like the Amazon one. I use three stars mostly for books with interesting ideas but poor execution.

Thanks for the comparison chart, Mark! I guess since I brought it up earlier, here's the BoardGameGeek rating descriptions for board games--in addition to an official 10-point scale, BGG also allows its users to edit the numbers to add decimal points. So while it's a 10-point scale, it's effectively a straight continuum.

(view spoiler)[10 - Outstanding - will always enjoy playing.
9 - Excellent - very much enjoy playing.
8 - Very good - enjoy playing and would suggest it.
7 - Good - usually willing to play.
6 - Ok - will play if in the mood.
5 - Mediocre - take it or leave it.
4 - Not so good - but could play again.
3 - Bad - likely won't play this again.
2 - Very bad - won't play ever again.
1 - Awful - defies game description. (hide spoiler)]

Obviously this doesn't translate to books exactly (at least not the full descriptions. But for me, the difference between "Excellent (9)" and "Outstanding (10)" in terms of just those words & numbers mean nothing to me.

So I just take Goodreads descriptions and ignore the numbers almost completely--I find that I rate most books 3s and 4s though (liked it, really liked it), with only books that hit a particular spot as 5s. 2s are for disappointing books, and 1s are for "why did I read this? ugh".

It seems like I pretty much follow the Amazon rating scale. 5 stars is for books I loved, mostly favorites and mostly books that I would re-read. Four stars for books I enjoyed a lot. Three stars is just kind of an average book for me. Two stars are for books that I disliked and often had trouble finishing or wanting to pick up. One star is mostly for books that I really disliked and typically made me angry for some reason. I don't like the fact that Goodreads only thinks you need one rating level for books you disliked. There are books I dislike and then there are books I loathe.

Yeah, like Jordan I think of 5 stars in the Amazon vein and for the same reason has Jordan - I want to be able to differentiate between levels of dislike as much as for levels of like. GR feels like they want to be Pollyanna - "Of course you like it, how MUCH did you like this... "?

It's Goodreads, not Badreads! :-D

To me the problem with ratings is the discrepancy between "I liked it" and "it is good".

A book (movie, meal, ....) can be enjoyable to me but badly written rubbish (action movies often fall in this category, I actually enjoyed the Man of Steel movie).

A book can be well written and executed well and I can hate it. The two are not exclusive.

Stars and thumbs cannot cope with this.

I figure Amazon/Netflix use them so they can show you stuff that people with similar profiles to you liked. They sell stuff so it works well for them. The reviews are less important.

My rankings are

★★★★★ - Ground breaking, brilliantly written and great story
★★★★☆ - Excellent, well written great fun.
★★★☆☆ - A good solid read that has some problems
★★☆☆☆ - Meh
★☆☆☆☆ - Bad, just bad...
☆☆☆☆☆ - Burn it, my eyes just rotted and fell out.

I've yet to give a book a one-star rating. I think if I'm disliking a book enough for it to deserve one star, I'll usually lem it - and I don't think it's fair to rate a book that you haven't finished reading.

I've only given one star to a dozen books, 0.7% of all the books I've rated. Most of them I read because I was reading them for something and felt obligated to finish them: a school assignment, a book club, or my Hugo winners challenge. A couple I wasn't reading for anything but they were very short and so I just went ahead and finished them. I also find it's kind of cathartic to just hate read a book every once in a while.

I have given a few. Usually if I haven't finished it is because the writing is excrible and not because I didn't like it. Recent Anita Blake books for example.

Iain wrote: "To me the problem with ratings is the discrepancy between "I liked it" and "it is good".

A book (movie, meal, ....) can be enjoyable to me but badly written rubbish (action movies often fall in t..."
This is a perennial problem with reviews, not just in books but any subjective arena. I'm a bit of a wine geek and the same issue arises there - I hate highly oaked wine but that's subjective. If I score a wine do I score it on what I like or on the fact that it's well-made and if someone likes that style, it's likely to be something they love?

My solution is this - a review of something subjective cannot reasonably pretend to anything more than one's opinion, so scores should express that. If you liked it a lot, score it highly. If not, don't. That's what a score means. For nuances and reasoning behind the score use the review - ("I love this, but I like [snarky urban fantasy]" or "I didn't like that all of the characters were snarky"). For example, several of the comments on this month's book note that the worldbuilding is exemplary but that the pace is far too slow for the reader so they don't like the book overall.

At the end of the day, trying to score objectively is foolish - what we like is by definition subjective. To me, that's not an issue - we should just be upfront in a review about our reason for the score. As for utility of scores, since people insist on using their own meanings for them, you cannot use a raw score as a metric. You have to know the reviewer's system, hence why it's more useful to be able to follow people.

PS: way back when, I was into high end audio gear and one of the leading magazines did something really useful. When they hired a new reviewer, they had that person first write an article about how they reviewed, what they valued, their listening setup etc. For example, I remember one reviewer who noted that he didn't care all the much about the low bass in a system since he mostly listened to small ensemble chamber using and jazz vocals. Another reviewer was all about full scale symphonic music so to them, bass response was very important. Knowing that let you know how to evaluate what each of them said.