You can't have your cake and eat it, too. This is the main reason I've never seriously used Goodreads as a source for pointed literary criticism. Like most social media, it's a bunch of self-important folks trying to be more self-important.
Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
21–30 of 493 posts
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#22Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#23i wish there was a site like goodreads, but good. but goodreads was not on track to be that site before amazon took it over.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#24Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#25Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#26Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#27This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon, and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague critical gestures towards Amazon in the first four paragraphs, it gets to its real point: Goodreads, a social network, has woefully inadequate censorship, which can lead to financial losses to authors and publishers. According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't…
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#28Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#29"Problem": chicken-and-egg problem. Until it's actually published, there's little or no way for a review site to verify that you actually got it, let alone read it.
Once it's published, people look at the reviews to decide whether to buy it. So where are those reviews going to come from, for a self-published book?
Solution: the publisher gives advance review copies to readers. Yes, the system IS ripe for abuse. But if you're reading a review, it ought to be apparent whether the reviewer actually read the book, or whether they have anything interesting to say.
And Goodreads should remove the bad ones.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#30Not affiliated, just a happy user of the site.