[gmw]

While I'm on the subject of Smashwords rating (Was I? Well I sort of was on another thread) ...

Does anyone actually use the Smashwords "Highest Rated" feature?

Currently, top of the list is 5.00 from 96 reviews. At approx. 15460 down the list you hit 4.98 from 209 reviews. In between are more than 12000 books with 2 or less 5 star reviews. How is that helpful to readers trying to find something possibly good amidst the mire?

Currently, the only way that a book will ever get anywhere near the top of the "Highest Rated" list is by having consistently 5 stars - which is an automatic: "Huh? That's suspicious, no one ever writes a book that everyone likes that much." And worse than that, this current system means that anything less than a five star review, even a single four among 99 fives, is going to drop the book into obscurity when viewed in ratings order.

Of course any more complex algorithm is immediately going to hit the sort of controversy that Amazon sees every time they fiddle with theirs, but the existing system seems ... pointless.

Yes, yes, I know that ratings is a dubious way to choose a book. But surely if they're going to offer a sort by rating there must be some way to make it vaguely helpful. Maybe a user selectable minimum number of ratings or something?

At the moment I'm one of those lucky sods with a single 5 star review sitting above that unlucky sod with 4.98 from 209 reviews, but even I can see it's not helpful to readers trying to find something good.

I guess, on the plus side - sort of - is that authors can effectively ignore their books' cumulative rating on Smashwords because it is useless. Yes, once you get a viewer onto your book's page the rating (in combination with review content) may count for something, but the ranking by rating is not something to worry our already distracted minds.