Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I thought the point of ARCs was marketing, to get people to purchase on publication. Once a book is released, it's like yesterday's newspaper; they might as well wait on reviews by puchasers.
No, no, no. That just works in Amazon's favor and against the small local seller!
Again, no. There's no point to ARC as feedback, short of something egregious which should have been caught earlier anyway. By the time the ARC comes out, the deal's been done, the money's been spent, the book is ready to go.
One, DNF is a perfectly legitimate and useful reaction.
And, most especially, you really trust people to be scrupulously honest about having read a book, if that's a condition? In light of all the flagrant dishonesty that's caused this brouhaha? You think one of these fake reviewers who trashed the competition would have stopped at having to affirm a book's been read and thought, "Oh, no, I couldn't do that." There's no eyeroll emotie big enough.
Goodreads is fine for my purposes although I wish it didn't market so aggressively and pointlessly. Granted, I don't have a horse in this race as I don't read genre fiction, especially current genre fiction. Still, it's easy enough to parse reviews and realize what's going on. False information is still information and tends to rebound in an unintended manner as it did here. Subtle enough not to be obvious is also subtle enough not to affect outcomes.
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Given that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, we could have a Verified Purchase like to do on the main site. That would be any flavor of the book. And also, given that Amazon in the US files library loans, a Verified Library Loan can also be added. It won't stop bogus reviews, but it might help some. Also, if Goodreads added a DNF with a date, then a review can be posted and I would hope a way to search for DNF reviews.