Week 5 Prompt

When looking at the two different sets of reviews in the resource folder, my first reaction is disgust at the Book Review Digest reviews. I mean, if I’m going to be reading something that long, I might as well just read the book itself. And the reviewers themselves come though and kind of pompous to me. However, one of the questions was whether, having read the reviews, I would purchase the reviewed book for my library, which makes a difference. Because when I look for book reivews, I’m doing it because I might want to read that book and I want to know what real, live, actual people thought of the book. Not people with inflated opinions of their own opinions passing judgment on books as a career. 

My BA was in English: Creative Writing, and boy can I tell you that everyone who thinks they know something about literature likes to pass judgment on books as if they were the final word on the matter. And having also read those same books for that same class, my opinion was usually vastly different than the opinions of the people who spoke the loudest and longest in that classroom. Me and the other four silent ones who sat against the wall, the ones who turned in our assignments with proper grammar and punctuation and page length, generally had similar opinions. But then, if we didn’t, it was pretty clear to us all that it was more a matter of taste and individual pet peeves than the actual quality of the book in question.

I guess all I’m saying is that, in my experience, the people who talk the loudest about books are the ones who subscribe to the idea that “I didn’t like it, therefore it must be a bad book.” Which I understand isn’t true of all professional book critics, but that is my bias coming into this situation. It is also pretty obvious that the Amazon reviews are even more open to bias and overarching generalizations. They aren’t exactly the most reliable thing on the planet. But they are usually honest. 

And not only are they honest, but you go read the reviews on a popular book, or even a regular book with a couple of dozen reviews on it and you can find the truth in there. You just have to look for trends. You have to translate and realize that the teenager with the lack of punctuation and the one star rating who is complaining that the book is boring and dull, and the well balanced 4 star rating that goes on for several paragraphs and mentions that it wasn’t a book she had to stay up late at night to finish but it was pretty good... well, they are both talking about the pacing. The book is slow. It doesn’t grab you and hold your attention with every word.

I would also point out that readers read and readers write about what they read. That’s why books get so many reviews on Amazon and why the website goodreads.com exists at all. So when I’m trying to figure out what to buy for my library that people will want to read, especially with fiction, I would consider both of these sites to be valuable sources of information. A book with 4 glowing reviews might have a perfect 5 star rating, but a book that has been out for a month and has over a hundred reviews might only have a 3.5. But a lot more people are reading that second book. And a majority of them liked it, even if it isn’t the vast majority. That means something to me. 

All that being said, in a professional setting, I think I would find the Book Review Digest type reviews a lot more useful than I do now. After all, the whole “I might as well just read the book” is a snappy comeback but in reality I don’t have the time to read that book, and the next book, and all of the other books that were published just in this month alone. That kind of long, but comparatively short, and usefully in depth look at a book could easily be very helpful to me as a librarian. Even if they do sound kind of pretentious.

On a totally different note, the whole e-book vs print book drama is just one of those ways where reality and he-way-it-has-been-done haven’t caught up with the technology. And you can hardly blame them considering how fast this new technology (computers in general, not just e-books) has come upon us and how slow, historically, human society adapts to new things. Do I think it’s right for e-books, or even self-published books if you want to get into that, to be treated as second class citizens in the review world? Not really. A book is a book, no matter what format. But that mostly just means that the people who put out e-books need to start thinking about a different form of marketing. After all, their product is designed and aimed at the computer user. The person with the tablet or the kindle or the smartphone. And with a little creativity, there are tons of ways to get that book out in front of the public. 

Because that’s all book reviews are. Marketing. In a lot of cases, free marketing. They are about someone using a public platform (e.g. a newspaper, magazine, blog, etc) to tell people “Hey! This book is pretty awesome. But that one kind of sucks!” So while I don’t think major publications should exclude books based on format, I also don’t think that authors and publishers of e-books have much room to whine about it. You get the book ready for the public eye, then you format it and put it on sale. The public downloads it. I’m sure there’s a bit more to it, but I know an e-book doesn’t require printing, reprinting, blinding, packing, shipping, shelving, storing, etc. Take some of the man hours you would have spent on that and market that book instead of just complaining that the old version of marketing isn’t being nice to you and your product. As far as I know, no one is banning e-books. They just aren’t reviewing them.