Quote:
Originally Posted by owly
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Or, rather, "what's popular for the year among books that were published in the US".
It doesn't actually say so anywhere for the main voting, but it's in the rules for write-in votes - only books published (in English) in the US during a specific time period are eligible.
In a way, I can understand this, but on the other hand, it's not really "readers' choice" like this - there were books in YA and middle-grade categories that I'd have preferred to vote for or nominate over those already there, books that were published in English, in 2013, but ... in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada. Not in the US, either because it will only get released there next year or because there is no US publisher for the book at all.
So I'm a little miffed - not so much that they only count US-published books but that they don't make it clear and obvious it's a restricted competition, not a general "Goodreads choice", considering Goodreads is a genuinely international major site.
(And also, this makes write-in votes from non-Americans difficult - there'll be a lot of wasted effort as readers outside the US can't really be expected to know if their favourite UK or Australian book was also released in the US this year or not; even checking "All editions" isn't going to be helpful as the edition information doesn't really say where the book was published.)
Other than this annoyance, I do like the awards thing. (And I'm pretty sure that the winners would all likely be US-published anyway, just because the size of the markets. Just, well, would be nice if they were up-front about it.)