SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
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Well, the main problem is that everyone has different tastes in books. Some may like horror, pick up Twilight, and give it a one, but another romance lover might give it a four. Another difference is that on Goodreads, you have writers and authors everywhere to judge the books... not just readers. This will cause the writer people to be more lax on the books because they may know how hard it is to write one and will be more lenient.
Just a thought... and I'm probably wrong so take it all with a shaker of salt.
My guess is that Amazon has more users than GoodReads and there is this statistical normal distribution (3 in the middle). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_d...On GoodReads are people more enthusiastic about books than on Amazon. That's all.
I think the problem is that enthusiasm is not randomly distributed. The people who read particular books are more prone to giving extreme marks. Broadly speaking, the Twilighters will give 5 stars to Twilight. Meanwhile, a lot of really well-read and 'sophisticated' readers will give 1 star to Twilight, 5 stars to, say, "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and 3 stars to some book that they think is good but not brilliant - let's say, Conrad's "Nostromo". BUT: the well-read are a small fraction of the people who rate Twilight, but a massive fraction of the people who rate Nostromo. So you get a situation where even if every single person who has read both books rates Nostromo higher than Twilight, Twilight will still receive a higher average grade than Nostromo. [And there's a really weird perverse incentive thing going on as well - when a book is 'good' enough to get famous, the general public start reading it, find it isn't Twilight, and give it 1-ratings... meanwhile an even less accessible and more recondite book gets a higher average rating because the people who would hate it haven't read it.]
So there's two factors that lead to weirdness. The first is that some people give higher marks than others, and those people aren't randomly distributed, but tend to have read certain books and not to have read others. The second is that some books have been read by more people than others, so rankings reflect the views of the general public, while others are not widely read, so their rankings reflect only the views of a small niche group.
[The first problem could be dealt with by normalising votes - Goodreads could weight individual votes so that, eg, a 5-ranking from someone who has only given 3 5-rankings out of 100 books counts for more than someone who has only read 20 books and given 5-rankings to 19 of them]
These issues effect Amazon less strongly because fewer people contribute there - which means that votes aren't so swayed by the high-enthusiasm low-reading vote.
[they're still generally pretty rubbish, though]
I think the issue is two-fold:1) I do think that a lot, or a fair amount, anyway, on goodreads tend to not want to give negative reviews.
Part of it is because people are aware of the fact that authors participate regularly on goodreads and may read the review and people seem hesitant to leave a negative review for fear the author will read it and it'll hurt their feelings.
Similarly, there's a notion that giving a book a bad review might stop someone from reading it who might otherwise enjoy it - and I've seen some people see this as a very bad thing. (Of course, it's ok if they give a glowing review to something and someone reads it and ends up hating it.)
So, yes, there is an atmosphere on goodreads, in general, which I feel favors positivity.
Which bring us to:
2) The ratings systems aren't graded the same way.
If you read the text that goes with the star ratings on goodreads 1 star is didn't like it, 2 stars is ok, 3 is liked it, 4 is really liked it, 5 is loved it.
On amazon 1 star is I hated it, 2 stars is I didn't like it, 3 is ok, 4 is like it, 5 is love it.
Personally, I prefer amazon's system but I try to go by goodreads system when rating books here.
Now, one would think this would actually skew the goodreads ratings lower... which might happen if more people rated books negatively.
Either way, though, you can't really just take amazon's ratings and goodread's ratings side-by-side because they mean different things.
Also, people on amazon are not afraid of being negative. Rather scathing, actually. More scathing than even I'm comfortable being. :-/
I think GR as more a social network just draws the 'nicer' crowd that doesn't like being mean. The glowing reviews here tend to get all the 'likes'. The scathing ones here usually have to be witty/funny as well in order to get over. Hell, the rating system here is skewed toward being nice.
Amazon is more realistic or straightforward about it. More like the Internet at large where if it sucks, say how much it sucks in as much detail as possible while condemning it and anyone who likes it to hell while also equating the author to Hitler.
Amazon is more realistic or straightforward about it. More like the Internet at large where if it sucks, say how much it sucks in as much detail as possible while condemning it and anyone who likes it to hell while also equating the author to Hitler.
I don't know if that made sense. It's too early n the morning and I just can't be arsed enough to be intelligible.
Ala wrote: "I don't know if that made sense. It's too early n the morning and I just can't be arsed enough to be intelligible."Indeed. All I can say now is there tends to be a difference and I find GR ratings and reviews more useful than those on Amazon.
One difference is that Amazon rewards top reviewers which makes it all iffy.
I want to know this because like you, I tend to go for books with a higher rating. With the fluctuations between the 2 sites though it's hard to figure things out. Sometimes it seems this site isn't as hard on authors as Amazon is.
My main problem is I like to usually only read books that have 4 stars or more on Amazon. But sometimes a book there will have 2-3 stars and on this site it will have an avg of 3.7 rating. A lot will also have a 3.8-4 rating.
Anywho I know this is off topic but there are no forums here. Also yes I am new to the site so if this is a bonehead post let me know.