Goodreads is so bad it allows reviews of books that don't even exist.
There exist pages for books that are "presumed" to exist based on author expectations, but have not been even conceived of yet, much less written, edited, titled, covered, published and read to be reviewed.
For example, Brandon Sanderson thinks that his current big hit series (Stormlight) will have ~10 books, he's currently half way writing the 5th book, so the 10th is a LONG way coming.
It's entirely possible he will change his plans, after all he did so for his other series Mistborn, he put four more books in between book 3 and what was originally going to be book 4 (now possibly book 8), if he doesn't change the plan again, or cancel the book series entirely and re-write the entire multiverse setup he has in his brain.
Yet a page for this hypothetical Stormlight book 10 exist:
There is no harm in pre-emptively creating a page bookmarking purposes, I supposed, but it already has 22 written reviews and 94 ratings giving it 4.68 stars.
WHY? why allow such things for non-existent books? How hard is it lock star ratings and comment box until the book is, you know, actually existant and read?
Pretty hard. There is no centralized book registry.
All you need to publish a book is a valid ISBN10/EAN13. You can buy those online in bulk. And technically you don't need one, but generally if you want to sell it enmasse you want one.
Given its owned by Amazon you'd think they'd limit it to known ASINs but then I guess they can't account for rare or old books that predate the isbn system.
Not long ago, I was in charge of a lending library at church. A very small lending library, like we started with one bookcase and grew to two.
At first, the most important task was sorting the donations, and determining which books were good for our shelves, and which to discard/recycle. So I was studying a lot of publication houses and authors and reputations. And at that time, I was sorting the books more or less by size and shape, or randomly.
So I had no catalog of books; each had a little library-style pocket with a library-style checkout card, and on the honor system, the parishioners would choose a book, remove the card, and keep the book for a few weeks. But we didn't know what was on the shelves in the first place.
So I decided I would find a book cataloging app for Android. You know, something that a small-time librarian could use. Ahahaha! That was a pointless exercise at the Play Store! Perhaps I gave up far too early. I also looked for a barcode scanning app, so that I could just zap each book and immediately know its ISBN and other details. At that point, I started noticing whether a book had a barcode or ISBN, and guess what, a lot of them had neither. More ISBNs than barcodes, that's for sure. What did I expect? These books were donated from parishioners who passed away, and represented 50 years or more of collecting tomes.
Eventually I just started taking photos of the bookshelves after I was done organizing them all. Oh, and there was at least one unknown person whose mission in life was to purposely mess up all the organized books, and put them in weird arrangements. Far more than someone who's innocently browsing the shelves, this was some kind of deliberate messing with my mind. It came to a point where I had to decide whether I would spend volunteer hours re-re-re-arranging and organizing, or just do a 10-minute tidy on it and stop worrying about this living Catholic troll.
Why not give Authors/Publishers control on adding books and flipping the "book is released" switch?
If Amazon just put a little bit of effort, they could make this into a "goodreads premium" thing and earn money to boot.
Imagine selling input codes for ARC reviewers to be able to input reviews before the book is released for the public; publishers would gladly pay for the privilege, so that when the book is actually available, the top reviews are those of ARC reviewers.
There could be other things Amazon could do, this is just something I thought could earn them money and thus align their incentives with readers. They just need to "care"
As someone who loves Goodreads, I've largely ignored the "bad parts" such as what this article is describing.
I've seen these review bombs on plenty of titles once certain authors or books become heavily politicized. Sometimes decades after the fact of their published book.
You also see a general sentiment of people who want to voice their opinion on how bad books are to the point where they say "DNF" and thus leave a scathing review over a single chapter.
I don't know if there is a fix to this problem, but I do wish more people read the entire book instead of judging it by its metaphorical cover.
I'm kind of torn on the DNF reviews as I have left a couple myself. Usually after several chapters at least though.
On the one hand, if I'm leaving the review because I disagree with the author of a nonfiction book, that's obviously not cool. But (this usually applies to novels but sometimes nonfiction too) if the book is badly written trash and I want to save other people from the wasted hours I just put in, a DNF review seems reasonable.
I don't know if it's the answer, but proving basic knowledge of a text could help e.g. a short multiple choice quiz. Anyone determined enough could defeat those measures of course, but it'd probably cut down on the volume of insincere reviews and lend credibility to those that pass.
Who is going to pay for the creation of those quizzes? Amazon bought Goodreads to minimize its own liabilities, but otherwise it doesn’t want to invest any more money in the site.
Morever, Goodreads doesn’t just cover a few popular fiction or non-fiction works for which a short multiple-choice quiz could be realistically created. It allows you to catalogue and review any book that has an ISBN. As someone involved in an academic field, my Goodreads activity is mainly obscure works of scholarship from university presses.
Goodreads, like any social network, attracts a lot of perpetually-online people involved in activism, the sort where it is acceptable and even encouraged to shout down authors whom one’s community regards as detrimental to society. No need to read the book first, because judgment has already been cast. Therefore, those users can’t be expected to feel ashamed for their behavior, rather their behaviour might even serve as a form of social currency with their in-group.
The solution is trust. Crowd sourced reviews are junk because you don’t know who wrote them, what their intentions are, or if they are in any way qualified (whatever that means to you) to review a book. With well known and trusted reviewer, you understand their biases and can adjust accordingly.
I don't think the issue here is about mmm individual being able to trust reviews. It's more about authors being pressured to write along certain lines due to hordes of basically bots upvoting/downvoting.
Almost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes? It’s been a learning experience for me as an author. The first chapter should not be special, it should be like the rest of the book.
> Almost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes?
Just to provide an alternative point of view from a reader, this is fine behavior. So long as you mention this in your review.
I’ve DNFed both movies and books in 10% or less. And that’s ok. There’s a ton of excellent books and movies to justify pushing yourself through content you don’t like. As someone put it, we’re not looking for needles in haystacks, we’re looking for needles in mountains of needles.
So, it’s not personal, but a review at 10% is still a valid review, if it’s honest about the slice read.
If the first chapter it first ten minutes are bad, then yeah, you should review it.
Especially if, as you say, the first chapter should be like the rest of the book... And the first chapter is bad, then how do you think the rest of the book is going to be?
> I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.
I once felt driven to leave a review of a book that I hadn't read.
I had purchased and read several books from a particular author - all reasonably enjoyable, but extremely badly written pulp sci-fi, and I was desperately trying to find some way to stop Amazon repeatedly promoting this garbage to me through notifications 2-3 times a week...
So not even a review as such, just a fruitless attempt to influence Amazon's algorithms!
> I write as someone who wish that people in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read.
That is weird expectation to me. At my book club we decide on what books we are interested in reading by voting. That of course means that sometimes what we end up reading something which turns out to be a dud, and then we discuss why or how it felt short of our expectations. Would you expect someone to pre-vet the books you embark on reading?
In my opinion picking a book for book club is not endorsement, but just an expression that it interests the book club.
People suck, so this is a non-solution. Review sites that accept fraudulent reviews are worthless so this should be seen as an existential crisis. I think should delete any reviews that were found to come out before a book could have been read, delete any other reviews they've written, and permaban their accounts.
Potential solve: Amazon owns Goodreads. Amazon has a way of tagging reviews with “certified purchaser,” and they could start filtering for only these reviews, rather than just flagging and boosting them (as the article says they are doing now). Of course this means you must buy the book from Amazon
Edit: don’t downvote me just because you hate this idea, haha. Obviously there are tradeoffs
Not only might you not have purchased from Amazon and instead bought it some other way, but
* Most early reviews are via ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) which you get through netgalley and similar sites, or directly from the author/publisher
* It is quite likely that you're reading something (legally) without having bought it because libraries exist
* Just because you bought it, doesn't mean you read it, and you might be tempted to leave a one-star review based on the fact that it shipped slowly and arrived late
Goodreads is much more international than Amazon, foreign users won’t realistically order from Amazon.com and might not have a local Amazon.xy site. For a time, one of the most active demographics on Goodreads was young female Iranians.
I don’t think Goodreads has any terrible power as I don’t think people rely on it for reviews or recommendations.
I’m sure this author is unhappy someone rated her low, but I don’t think it affects sales. Although it’s hard to know. I expect Amazon ratings are more important.
> I don’t think people rely on it for reviews or recommendations
Not sure why you think that, since that's literally the entire purpose of the site.
And it's the 175th most popular site in the US [1], so clearly lots of people use it for that.
So it's definitely going to affect sales. How much, or whether Goodreads or Amazon reviews affect sales more, is hard to say. But the idea that it has no effect isn't plausible.
> that's literally the entire purpose of the site.
It’s not the entire purpose of the site. The site also serves to simply keep track of the books that one has read – you can export your activity as a CSV file, so (at least for the time being) you still own your own data. Quite a few of the users listed under books that I read, simply catalogued the book as "Read" without giving it a star rating or writing a review.
I know this is completely anecdotal, but I've been a Goodreads user since before Amazon purchased them, and I have found that Goodreads reviews are way more accurate...or, more accurately, they don't have as high of a degree of skew towards very low or very high ratings.
It's definitely changed my buying behavior on more than 1 occasion. I have to imagine it's a big driver of sales, otherwise, as the article mentioned, Amazon would have made much larger UX changes post acquisition.
I’ve been using Goodreads for a long time, I think since just after they launched. And I’ve read a bunch of books logged there and I’ve never made a reading decision based on reviews.
I don’t think I’ve ever used it to “discover” a book other than notice a friend is reading something and to check out the book.
I'm surprised to hear this because I think Goodreads reviews are pretty useful. I like to explore used book stores and if I find a book that looks interesting, but I don't know much about, I'll typically look it up on Goodreads and skim the reviews. Reading why people did or didn't like the book has proven to be a pretty useful guide for me.
I usually stay far away from current political or social war titles which might explain why it's more useful for me than some others.
I used to rely on Goodreads for making a buying decision if I was in a bookstore, weighing up two books.
It quickly became apparent relying on this was useless, and Goodreads is vulnerable to all the polarization and all-or-nothing thinking that plagues social media (and society in general).
Due to how books work, Goodreads could require reviewers to put the book on the "currently reading" list X amount of time before a review could be written, or it could at least display the "read time" on the review, similar to how Steam does with reviews.
I stopped trusting Goodreads when I read a review for "The Mythical Man Month" which gave it 1 star because the author used "He" pronouns when referring to software engineers. Remember that this was a book written in 1975.
Almost every book on goodreads has between 3.5 and 4.2 rating and it seems unrelated to the quality of the book or it’s sales stats. Anything above 4, theoretically, stands out, but often not, often it’s just a rating shortage or something in the zeitgeist leading to high ratings that year, which may not apply to next year. I only use the site myself to look for 3-4 star reviews, hoping somebody with this middle of the road rating said the good and the bad, but also, there’s a ton of spoilers in those reviews, so even then, I avoid them…
Readit News
There exist pages for books that are "presumed" to exist based on author expectations, but have not been even conceived of yet, much less written, edited, titled, covered, published and read to be reviewed.
For example, Brandon Sanderson thinks that his current big hit series (Stormlight) will have ~10 books, he's currently half way writing the 5th book, so the 10th is a LONG way coming.
It's entirely possible he will change his plans, after all he did so for his other series Mistborn, he put four more books in between book 3 and what was originally going to be book 4 (now possibly book 8), if he doesn't change the plan again, or cancel the book series entirely and re-write the entire multiverse setup he has in his brain.
Yet a page for this hypothetical Stormlight book 10 exist:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17250985-untitled
There is no harm in pre-emptively creating a page bookmarking purposes, I supposed, but it already has 22 written reviews and 94 ratings giving it 4.68 stars.
WHY? why allow such things for non-existent books? How hard is it lock star ratings and comment box until the book is, you know, actually existant and read?
All you need to publish a book is a valid ISBN10/EAN13. You can buy those online in bulk. And technically you don't need one, but generally if you want to sell it enmasse you want one.
Given its owned by Amazon you'd think they'd limit it to known ASINs but then I guess they can't account for rare or old books that predate the isbn system.
At first, the most important task was sorting the donations, and determining which books were good for our shelves, and which to discard/recycle. So I was studying a lot of publication houses and authors and reputations. And at that time, I was sorting the books more or less by size and shape, or randomly.
So I had no catalog of books; each had a little library-style pocket with a library-style checkout card, and on the honor system, the parishioners would choose a book, remove the card, and keep the book for a few weeks. But we didn't know what was on the shelves in the first place.
So I decided I would find a book cataloging app for Android. You know, something that a small-time librarian could use. Ahahaha! That was a pointless exercise at the Play Store! Perhaps I gave up far too early. I also looked for a barcode scanning app, so that I could just zap each book and immediately know its ISBN and other details. At that point, I started noticing whether a book had a barcode or ISBN, and guess what, a lot of them had neither. More ISBNs than barcodes, that's for sure. What did I expect? These books were donated from parishioners who passed away, and represented 50 years or more of collecting tomes.
Eventually I just started taking photos of the bookshelves after I was done organizing them all. Oh, and there was at least one unknown person whose mission in life was to purposely mess up all the organized books, and put them in weird arrangements. Far more than someone who's innocently browsing the shelves, this was some kind of deliberate messing with my mind. It came to a point where I had to decide whether I would spend volunteer hours re-re-re-arranging and organizing, or just do a 10-minute tidy on it and stop worrying about this living Catholic troll.
Why not give Authors/Publishers control on adding books and flipping the "book is released" switch?
If Amazon just put a little bit of effort, they could make this into a "goodreads premium" thing and earn money to boot.
Imagine selling input codes for ARC reviewers to be able to input reviews before the book is released for the public; publishers would gladly pay for the privilege, so that when the book is actually available, the top reviews are those of ARC reviewers.
There could be other things Amazon could do, this is just something I thought could earn them money and thus align their incentives with readers. They just need to "care"
I've seen these review bombs on plenty of titles once certain authors or books become heavily politicized. Sometimes decades after the fact of their published book.
You also see a general sentiment of people who want to voice their opinion on how bad books are to the point where they say "DNF" and thus leave a scathing review over a single chapter.
I don't know if there is a fix to this problem, but I do wish more people read the entire book instead of judging it by its metaphorical cover.
On the one hand, if I'm leaving the review because I disagree with the author of a nonfiction book, that's obviously not cool. But (this usually applies to novels but sometimes nonfiction too) if the book is badly written trash and I want to save other people from the wasted hours I just put in, a DNF review seems reasonable.
Morever, Goodreads doesn’t just cover a few popular fiction or non-fiction works for which a short multiple-choice quiz could be realistically created. It allows you to catalogue and review any book that has an ISBN. As someone involved in an academic field, my Goodreads activity is mainly obscure works of scholarship from university presses.
Deleted Comment
"Do not review a book you haven’t read."
People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick.
Just to provide an alternative point of view from a reader, this is fine behavior. So long as you mention this in your review.
I’ve DNFed both movies and books in 10% or less. And that’s ok. There’s a ton of excellent books and movies to justify pushing yourself through content you don’t like. As someone put it, we’re not looking for needles in haystacks, we’re looking for needles in mountains of needles.
So, it’s not personal, but a review at 10% is still a valid review, if it’s honest about the slice read.
> People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick.
Replace books with games and the whole gaming community will be in pitchforks after you.
> "Do not review a book you haven’t read."
No, that isn't the perfect solution. Andrew Gelman stated the issue better here ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/07/02/the_moral_... ):
> I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2325928726
He's #6 in Australia.
If hundreds of people like a review which clearly states that the reviewer hasn't read the book what are you meant to do.
I had purchased and read several books from a particular author - all reasonably enjoyable, but extremely badly written pulp sci-fi, and I was desperately trying to find some way to stop Amazon repeatedly promoting this garbage to me through notifications 2-3 times a week...
So not even a review as such, just a fruitless attempt to influence Amazon's algorithms!
That is weird expectation to me. At my book club we decide on what books we are interested in reading by voting. That of course means that sometimes what we end up reading something which turns out to be a dud, and then we discuss why or how it felt short of our expectations. Would you expect someone to pre-vet the books you embark on reading?
In my opinion picking a book for book club is not endorsement, but just an expression that it interests the book club.
Edit: don’t downvote me just because you hate this idea, haha. Obviously there are tradeoffs
* Most early reviews are via ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) which you get through netgalley and similar sites, or directly from the author/publisher
* It is quite likely that you're reading something (legally) without having bought it because libraries exist
* Just because you bought it, doesn't mean you read it, and you might be tempted to leave a one-star review based on the fact that it shipped slowly and arrived late
I’m sure this author is unhappy someone rated her low, but I don’t think it affects sales. Although it’s hard to know. I expect Amazon ratings are more important.
Not sure why you think that, since that's literally the entire purpose of the site.
And it's the 175th most popular site in the US [1], so clearly lots of people use it for that.
So it's definitely going to affect sales. How much, or whether Goodreads or Amazon reviews affect sales more, is hard to say. But the idea that it has no effect isn't plausible.
[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/goodreads.com/#ranking
It’s not the entire purpose of the site. The site also serves to simply keep track of the books that one has read – you can export your activity as a CSV file, so (at least for the time being) you still own your own data. Quite a few of the users listed under books that I read, simply catalogued the book as "Read" without giving it a star rating or writing a review.
It's definitely changed my buying behavior on more than 1 occasion. I have to imagine it's a big driver of sales, otherwise, as the article mentioned, Amazon would have made much larger UX changes post acquisition.
I’ve been using Goodreads for a long time, I think since just after they launched. And I’ve read a bunch of books logged there and I’ve never made a reading decision based on reviews.
I don’t think I’ve ever used it to “discover” a book other than notice a friend is reading something and to check out the book.
I usually stay far away from current political or social war titles which might explain why it's more useful for me than some others.
That said, if it has a low number of recommendations, like in many of the examples, then I won't give it much mind.
It quickly became apparent relying on this was useless, and Goodreads is vulnerable to all the polarization and all-or-nothing thinking that plagues social media (and society in general).