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@Sic,
Sorry for the detours in the thread here. I like your thought about a place to have a book rating/review site. However, I think much of that exists in some form or other, doesn't it. That would seem to mean that the bar is high for something new like that to be useful.
There are a lot of "best books" lists for both all-time and for new books (e.g. bestseller lists). True, many of those don't capture all the good books because they are based on specific types of sales, but it's a way to find good books. Sci-fi, especially, has lots of best books of the year, decade, centure, etc. I wish they were a little more descriptive of sub-genre, but they are still useful.
And after finding candidate books, Amazon is usually my next stop to get more info and reviews. Google provides even more if you really want to know.
But any book ratings are of limited value in my mind because of such different tastes. Usually I want to know what people liked or didn't like about the book. Was it like a thriller/horror type of scifi, or a mystery scifi, or a thoughtful serious scifi, or a light fun-hearted scifi?. What was the basic theme, topic? Were characters developed? Was it dark? Was it uplifting? Etc Etc. Reviews and authors info tend to provide some of that, but not always a lot.
So, I'm all in favor of more info that helps point us to books we would like. It's still a challenge to find the good ones.
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