Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
What is the incentive to post thoughtful and honest reviews? Any time you post a review, it is for the benefit of the people creating and selling the product. You are rarely receiving monetary benefits. You rarely have a sense of responsibility to other consumers. Heck, you can't even count on recognition.
In other words, any intelligent person would just skip writing a review and do something more productive with their time.
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I agree. In the past, I never would have bothered about reviews. Neither reading them, nor writing them.
But, in my opinion, because of the increasing number of self published books, the portion of low quality books for example did increase drastically over the last year or so.
In the past, publishers and editors did guarantee at least some kind of minimum quality. That's history now. Anyone can publish their books.
I don't care that much about the 10 Euro, I might invest in a low quality book. But I care about the overall quality of my collection. I even started, permanently deleting some titles I couldn't stand.
So, actually I started to sometimes read reviews, when I haven't heard of the author before.
And then I don't mind "bad" reviews. No better review, than learning about inconsistencies in the storyline or bad writing or other details like that.
But I simply don't see any sense, in seeing discussed the pricing structures for eBooks or the publishing business per se in a book review...
And personally, I don't see much difference whether I write or read a book review or whether I discuss features of a new tablet here on Mobileread. To the expert, it can be fun sharing his expertise. To the Newbie, it can be helpful for the buying decision. Why shouldn't both, reader and writer, both benefit from their discussions?