I suspect most people go to Amazon to buy a book they've heard about on Goodreads, generally considered the best book review site, or perhaps read about in the papers or a blog. If that's the case, it's a pity because Amazon has done a lot to make book pages as informative as possible. There's plenty of good stuff to be found on a book page, ranging from customer reviews neatly ranked by stars (one star = "I hate it" to 5 stars = "I love it") to lists of books purchased by other customers ("Customers who bought this item also bought..."), not to mention "highlights and notes" and forums and all sorts of goodies...
To Amazon's eternal credit one should point out that the book's sales ranking is hidden in the "book details" while customer reviews are in the forefront, like this (I took here the case of one of my books):
But there is no doubt that the review system is not perfect and could be vastly improved. With its technical capability, Amazon ought to be able to improve the standard review done by readers who are neither literary critics nor expert authors, just people who love to read. True, Amazon has set up review guidelines that are very clear and readable but I'm not sure many people look at them before posting their reviews.
Surely, a more "guided process" could be electronically set up. For the time being, the star ranking is entirely subjective: you're asked to assign stars on the basis of an overall like/dislike, no need to provide supporting evidence for your choice. Instead of clicking on the stars to establish the ranking, why not ask a few simple questions in either a pop-up window or a drop-down menu that would "guide" the number of stars awarded, ensuring that all the main features of a novel are taken into account?
Let's take the case of fiction (obviously different questions would need to be developed for non-fiction): we all know that a novel's quality is based on a number of aspects, the same for all novels: the quality of character development, plot, setting etc. One could take, for example, the 8 points that the judges on the SLO NightWriters Contest use to evaluate entries:
1)Beginning/Ending,
2)Character,
3)Dialogue,
4)Narrative Voice & Point of View,
5)Description of Setting,
6)Emotional Impact,
7)Plot / Story Arc,
8)Use of Language.
My proposal is simple enough: ask readers to rate the book on a scale of 5, from bad = 1 to excellent = 5 for each of the above points, and once all the aspects are rated, poof! There you have it, it's electronic magic, your 5 star rating would be all done, synthesizing all 8 points! Ok, perhaps 8 points to score a book are too many and could be reduced to 4 or 5, but something like that would force people to think before assigning stars and make the whole rating system a lot more objective and based on observation. The very same points should also help readers in writing up their review, drawing their attention to the criteria they should refer to when passing judgment.
One additional plus: if Amazon does this well, it could even be fun to watch the results of one's choices translate in a particular number of stars...
This is just a modest proposal to improve the quality of book reviews on Amazon, a simple electronic tweak but it might work wonders to make the system more reliable as a guide to book discovery. Because, when all is said and done, book reviews, aside from word of mouth, remain the single biggest tool for discovering new good reads!
What do you think of this idea? What other suggestions would you have to improve Amazon's book review system?
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