book reviews sites
Exploring the Impact and Evolution of Online Book Review Platforms
As traditional offline bookstore chains used to be the major source of book information, the conversion of readers in bookstores gives significant guidance on which books are favored by readers. Traditionally, readers tend to use best-seller lists as the guide for their book purchasing. For example, the New York Times best-seller list is one of the most famous best-seller lists in the United States. Publishers value the position of a book on a best-seller list more than the aggregated sales of the book. A book with a higher ranking on best-seller lists tends to be more popular and prompts readers to pay more attention in comparison with a book with similar sales figures. By purchasing their favorite books, readers can recognize a best-seller early and increase the overall sales speed. In the age of the internet, the publishing industry faces challenges due to the arrival of online bookstore chains.
Online book review platforms have a profound impact on the publishing industry. However, many questions about the review platforms are yet to be answered. This article attempts to understand these review platforms in the context of the publishing industry. We construct a model to analyze the strategies of main entities in the industry, including the readers, publishers, and review platforms. Insights gained from the model guide us to understand many practical phenomena. We also conduct analysis using data from Goodreads to measure how these platforms affect the sales of books. We believe our article can facilitate a better understanding of the book review platforms and inform the improvements of these platforms in the future.
In this paper, we review online book review impact research and critique methodologies that measure book review outcomes to interrogate how these online book ratings or reviews impact authors, readers, and the larger book market. We argue that online book reviews are both different from traditional book reviews – those written by literary critics and published in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals – as well as calcified abstractions of the types of dialogic interactions readers have about books face to face, in book clubs, in libraries, and in classrooms. We then present an alternative framework for times when online book reviews may be especially impactful for these three actors and point out the social, historical, and other factors that contribute to the influence of online book reviews.
Over the past two decades, internet book rating and review services – in particular those provided by social media platforms – have become important sources of digital literary interpretation. Ratings and reviews on websites like Amazon, Goodreads, or Bookish enable readers to compare their perspectives about books with others and help them decide which books to read next. They also assist non-academic businesses such as publishers, agents, writers, and bookstores in marketing books and in making informed editorial, financial, and strategic business decisions. Consequently, many have strived to better understand the impact of online book reviews. Much of this research investigates how ratings and reviews influence books’ sales, with the ultimate goal of discovering methods to manipulate them in order to increase a book’s financial success. We challenge these goals by instead framing book ratings and reviews as conversations about books between authors and readers; as a result of this contrast, our examination of the emergence and evolution of online book review platforms raises different questions about the impact of online book ratings and reviews.
The Role of Online Book Review Sites in the Literary Community
Tiffany C. Li Hsu Assistant Professor Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, USA
Benjamin Johnson Assistant Professor Denison University Granville, OH
Activities such as joining the platforms and organizing interactions to explore features and to capture each step of the experience were employed by members of the research team. Protocols were designed to aid these tasks. Examples of items used in the individual tools were captured, alongside narratives and screenshots. An account for each platform was successfully created. All stages of a review assignment were conducted at least once to gauge the preliminary user experience. Members of the research team interacted with platform designers and parties such as the library reference staff. The comparison focused on publicly available interfaces at the time of the study (2016-2017). Technologies viewed included the ‘Request’ feature of WorldCat; the process of organizing a WorldCat account; the popular book review and transacting platforms Amazon and Goodreads; bibliographic sharing tools such as Zotero, Mendeley, LibraryThing, and Shelfari; and publisher’s catalogs, including the ‘Ratings & reviews’ feature of British publisher Alma Books. Other platforms such as Bookish, Open Library, Lovereading, iDOGO, Bizrate, another WorldCat feature known as WorldCat Identities, and exclusive library services related to reading lists were either used to aid investigation of a later project or returned over the years with different test cases.
To compare and understand the diverse elements and functionalities of online book review platforms, comprehensive details of potential user experience aspects of current platforms were collected. User experience has been defined as that which emerges when one uses, interacts with, and reflects on technology around them. Techniques employed to collect relevant data included access to relevant websites, the use of features of the platform (e.g., forming an account, rating, adding items, tagging, editing), email consultations and conversations with users, providing questionnaires and listeners to interview different parties (such as platform designers, coders, and sponsors like library representatives) about the services and issues of the tool.
Data Collection Techniques
Even with the ease and low costs of web-based reviews, as opposed to more expensive, space-saving options in print, ethical challenges about online book reviews have become complex over the years. This chapter focuses on the ethical responsibilities that a book reviewer on a book review website should consider, including honesty and objectivity, fairness, responsibility, and expertise, and the relationship between the reviewer and the author as well as the editor of the review site.
As book reviews have evolved over time, the issue of ethics and challenges faced with book reviewing has also moved forward, encompassing a digital transformation with the communication and delivery of these critical evaluations. Online book reviews not only deal with the traditional ethics about what should be included and excluded, but also with issues that are unique in the digital age. A major shift has occurred in the attitude toward online reviewing, and what was once viewed as acceptable has changed significantly. In the early days of the web, online book reviews were looked upon with disdain, but have now increasingly become a part of the business, literary festivals, and are even accepted in the major publishing industry standard—Booklist.
These solutions and the forms of collaborative production highlight the democratization of the access to and production of cultural goods. But will the widespread and, most important, collaborative production of reviews erode the impact of the majority of critics? The long tail model, which sees online technologies resulting in a diversification of audience preference in the long run, on the one hand suggests that the value of individually produced reviews could attract attention from those who favor these particular reviews, even if the expert’s overall web or social media reputation is not particularly high. Finding the particular web communities interested in that critic’s work, however, requires a great deal of effort, which may dampen the number of feedback and the overall impact one can have.
Along these lines, a number of scholars and practitioners have called for the creation of forms of consumer-managed reviews, in which the audience, and not an expert, plays an active and dominant role. These venues remain to be explored, future options include profit-sharing agreements with the expert, collaborative review processes, a democratically organized professional community of book reviewers, an omnipresent commenting feature for review platforms, which might make all articles de facto wikis, or an open-source solution allowing social network operators and newspapers to display reviews with links pointing to a website developed by the community of reviewers.
This study has presented the structural, social, and status-based dimensions of book reviews, exploring the function of reviews as a multilateral platform. Our findings begin to contribute evidence for assessing the need for complementing this mix of reviewers with incentive-centered and peer collaboration platforms. Platforms of this type would help to refocus the role of critics from arbiters to facilitators of wisdom of the crowd processes around media goods.
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