Quote:
Originally Posted by Synamon
I wanted to respond to this portion of your post. I'm actually more disappointed in the lack of discussion. You seem very concerned about all the "old" books, but the most recent new book, The Bat, got only 5 posts in the discussion thread. That's horrible. Not that most of the discussion threads last year were much better, but they usually got to double digits.
I don't think it matters how many books get nominated, it matters that no one is reading or participating in discussions about the one book that is chosen by vote. I'd be interested in knowing why this is.
Is one book every month too much to handle? I know some of the nominated books have been long and even as a voracious reader length is something I consider when I vote. Some of those older books are shorter which is another advantage in addition to their easy availability.
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I can agree with no one reading or discussing being a problem (since I have no gauge whether people read it or not). The Bat was one of those with 5/10, but The Picture of Dorian Grey was 7/16. Who voted and didn't bother to discuss? We could find out, but there is nothing to gain in forcing people to read when they vote. I like votes because its a general interest in what we might be reading and if the nominations at least looked interesting to start. We will lose people who don't finish a book, we will lose people that just got too busy, or rethought their vote later. But if there's no interest in voting we can't possibly have any interest in reading. Call me an optimist in that sense, I care about the potential. It's probably flawed, but it is also a much easier number to measure than number of people involved in a discussion. Without looking through each comment I can't know if people just chimed in saying I read that book in high school and it blew chunks or if they said they weren't going to reread it at this time.
Votes is the number of votes a title garnered in the first round of voting (not in the runoff if there was one) and discussion indicates the number of users involved in the discussion (not the number of posts in the discussion):
Code:
Title votes discussion
The Iron King 10 11
The Cricket of the Hearth 15 8
The Bat 10 5
The Man Who Would be King 13 7
The Grapes of Wrath 14 11
The Dispossessed 16 11
Rites of Spring 8 4
Hyperion 17 10
The Cuckoo's Calling 13 12
the Picture of Dorian Gray 16 7
Outlander 10 14
All Quiet on the Western Front 7 9
*
* inferences made from this data are prone to error, lies and misjudgements
There's lots of non-participants in the discussion. Discussion participation can trail by quite a bit since the vote. I'm sure there is a stale date at which point the data is relatively indicative of how successful a month could be deemed. The Bat was terrible indeed (I personally haven't found mystery to be a very good genre), but overall we are sticking around ten participants in the discussion each month.