Star Rating System for Books: More Complicated than you think

As readers, we rely on the five-star rating system to help decide whether to buy a book.

As authors, we rely on the system to sell books. Good reviews help sell books, and bad reviews will kill a book.

Obviously, the system is subjective. Books recognized to be great works of literature written by Nobel Prize or Pulitzer Prize-winning authors receive one-star reviews, while books that are poorly written and poorly edited (by and large the self-publishing world) get barrels of five-star reviews....