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Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

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Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#21
Calling "contextualizing a piece of literature in its broader sociopolitical context" review-bombing is pretty myopic. For example, if you decided to write a book on how awesome the Nazis were, you would rightfully raise some eyebrows. But in any case, the problem with crowd-sourced reviews is that this is a "live by the sword, die by the sword" kind of game. It's great when a bunch of lemmings love your book, cause it to catapult in ratings, and go viral. But, some are now discovering that it can go both ways: the masses being "negatively viral" or purposefully trolling, or brigading.

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.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#22

Goodreads 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…

Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups get bought. Not to become part of the parent company's business, no, just not to become a competitor later. Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a solution? I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#23
i've been "using" goodreads since long before amazon bought it, and it's always just been kind of terrible. It was a clunky, not terribly nice to use site full of absolutely garbage-tier book reviews. the only redeeming quality was the authors who would leave honest reviews on each other's books.

i 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

#25

Goodreads 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…

And this wasn’t Amazon’s only acquisition in this space. They bought Shelfari before this and also drove it into the ground.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#27

This 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…

Preventing fraud, not censorship. Writing a fake review of a book that hasn't even been finished written yet is fraud.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#28

Eh, 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…

I disagree that stars should be evenly distributed between 1 to 5 stars. I think it's quite possible that most books that people choose to read end up being a 3 (good with some flaws) or 4 (good but not all-time great). It's kind of like the same thing with pizza. I'd give most pizza a 3 or 4. Very few 1s and 5s to be sure. 1 doesn't have to mean bottom 20% of pizzas. It can mean "awful, couldn't finish," where very few pizzas would fall into that category. 5 doesn't need to mean "best 20% of pizzas," it can mean "telling strangers about it the next day," again where very few pizzas would fall into that category.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#29
> But Goodreads allows any user, not just those who’ve received advance copies, to leave ratings months before books are released. Authors who’ve become targets of review-bombing campaigns say there’s little moderation or recourse to report the harassment. Writers dealing with stalkers have pointed to the same problem.

"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.

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