Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Although for some people what you suggest is sufficient for deciding whether to buy an ebook or not, it is insufficient for me and I suspect it is insufficient for a great number of readers.
|
I guess I'm not sure what else you would need to determine if an unknown book is worth reading. In my opinion, everything is right there. You have a chunky sample, opinions of the rest of the world, and buying habits of the rest of the world all right there for the taking. Heck, Amazon even has a Netflix-like system in place where buyers can flag every review they found as helpful, not helpful, or inappropriate and you have the ability to look at every other product a reviewer has written about.
A price tag of $.99 is completely arbitrary. Do you feel you could stumble across your new favorite author by randomly buying $.99 novels and then randomly choosing one to read long enough to form an opinion?
As you said, you only review things you love or hate. Isn't it then safe to assume that quite a few other people take the same stance on reviewing? Of course people have differing views on what's good but the reviews I read on Amazon are quite often spot-on and the most "liked" reviews always go into great depth instead of just saying they loved it or hated it.
On Amazon you can't even give a product a star rating without also supplying a review. And you can only give a review using an account that has made a purchase through Amazon. It's not perfect but the systems in place now are infinitely better than standing next to some guy in a book store and having him show you a book he likes or perusing the "manager's choice" section.
It actually takes quite a bit of effort to make poor or uninformed buying decisions with all the tools we have available today.