Goodreads ratings are less than useless

[orlok]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

They say they have to get the cover from either the author's website or the publisher's website. So if the cover is of a rather low resolution and you point them to the very same image but higher resolution from someplace else, they won't use it. The only way you can use the other images is if you get to create the listing.

That's factually inaccurate. I have added/amended several cover images to improve the resolution or add new versions several times on Goodreads.

[latepaul]

Goodreads is not a site for crowd-sourcing reviews or ratings. Goodreads is a site for cataloguing your book collection. And if you happen to add a rating or a review then it naturally feels as much "your" metadata as the date you read the book or the fact you've shelved it as a "holiday read" and "disappointing ending".

Having said that, Goodreads has such a large membership that mostly, especially for popular books, the idiosyncrasies of people's rating habits are averaged out such that a 4.3 star book will probably be better than a 2.6 one. Usually.

I think picking a highly anticipated book from a massively popular series and looking at its ratings after it has only just come out is going to give you an outlier in this regard. You will end up with lots of 5 star ratings that mean "I've not read this yet but I'm really really excited about it."

Finally, as has been said before, if you're upset at the way Goodreads allows users to rate because you want a higher degree of certainty that you'll like a book before you read it - well such certainty is an illusion. Your favourite author can let you down, your most sympatico reviewer may mislead you, your trusted friend with the most similar taste can suddenly fall out of sync with you. You can minimise the risk but you can't eliminate the chance of not enjoying your next read.

Oh well, you'll just have to live with that.

[4691mls]

Is there a reason WHY people would want to give ratings to books that they have not yet read? other than they are huge fans of the author and want to skew the overall rating number up by giving 5 stars to an unread book? (or I suppose if they hate the author, they could give 1 star to try to skew the overall rating down?)

I am not a goodreads member - I just look at reviews there from time to time - so maybe there is something about the way the ratings work that I don't understand?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

Is there a reason WHY people would want to give ratings to books that they have not yet read? other than they are huge fans of the author and want to skew the overall rating number up by giving 5 stars to an unread book? (or I suppose if they hate the author, they could give 1 star to try to skew the overall rating down?)

I am not a goodreads member - I just look at reviews there from time to time - so maybe there is something about the way the ratings work that I don't understand?

Once a book's listing is up on Goodreads, you can add it to your shelves and rate it. You don't have to have read it and it doesn't have to have been released. I also don't get why people would want to rate a book they've not read.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Another issue with Goodreads s that a lot of people do want to be able to find others based on a similarity in books. There's a rather long thread that goes back a number of years. The staff reply that they are looking into it and they've been looking into it for years. That means it'll never happen even though a lot of people have requested this feature.

Goodreads don't actually listen to users all that much. Some of the rules they have in place make no sense at all. For example, covers. They say they have to get the cover from either the author's website or the publisher's website. So if the cover is of a rather low resolution and you point them to the very same image but higher resolution from someplace else, they won't use it. The only way you can use the other images is if you get to create the listing.

How many people in a lot?
10, 100, 10000?

[Atunah]

I have never heard of any reviews from goodreads automatically going to Amazon. That doesn't even make sense. Not one of mine has ever been automatically been posted on Amazon, I never heard of anyone saying that theirs had. And unless you have your accounts linked, they wouldn't know who is who anyway.

My goodreads is linked to amazon via my kindle, but I still have 2 different accounts with 2 different sign ins. No overlap of anything. I have to post the reviews in both places if I want them to show. Some I only post on goodreads as I have more control over the author friend mobs if they descend.

I don't get everything I would like on goodreads either, how could they make everyone happy. They have like what, 20 million users? I just don't think I am this special snowflake who's wants outweigh the majority of users.

Beside a couple of users, none of my friends and folks I follow have left goodreads. There was some kerfluffle a while back and many have said they will leave and stomp their feet. They never did as there isn't a viable alternative.

[Blossom]

You're right there isn't a real alternative out there. I don't post reviews on Goodreads anymore. I post mine on Amazon because the author is less likely to try and comment or PM you about the review. I had a few authors try to argue with me over my review on Goodreads so I just deleted them. Amazon does a good job at keeping authors from bothering you.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Blossom

You're right there isn't a real alternative out there. I don't post reviews on Goodreads anymore. I post mine on Amazon because the author is less likely to try and comment or PM you about the review. I had a few authors try to argue with me over my review on Goodreads so I just deleted them. Amazon does a good job at keeping authors from bothering you.

Sent from my Nexus 7

Well they can comment on your review but everyone can see it.

Now what some authors will do is down vote a negative review to try to make it disappear.
Especially if it the most critical review. Or the only critical review.

Oh and yes, I have gotten a PM (not here) from an author about a negative review. It was how could you do that if you didn't like the book you shouldn't have reviewed it.

Sorry if I read a book and the description says stand alone and the last line in the book is buy the next one to find out what happens, yes I will leave a review.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by shalym

So which reviews on Amazon come from Goodreads without the permission of the Goodreads poster? Is there some criteria Amazon uses to decide that they are going to post some Goodreads reviews to Amazon, but not others? I'm looking at reviews for "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness, and I'm actually not seeing duplication of reviews. Can you please point me to an example where reviews were copied to Amazon from Goodreads without the poster's permission?

Shari

Shari, I knew about it originally because they used several of my own reviews. Apparently, the algorithm randomly selected those reviews where a 5 star rating was given. If you changed the rating to a 3 or 4, it eventually dropped out of the advertising page. Perhaps you remember the italicized review formatting Amazon had 3 years ago? Those are the reviews that came from Goodreads. The change to the 'verified purchase' may have changed how they do things. Don't know and I don't care enough to look them up.

Anyway, later on, I discovered an opt-out setting and selected that. If you look under your Goodreads Account settings, log in, select SETTINGS and then uncheck the box next to "allow partners of Goodreads to display my reviews". Wallah...your reviews are now limited to Goodreads and will not appear on Amazon.

Cinisajoy, I don't think I've ever had a pm from an author about my rating or review. Maybe I should read more books with living authors so that I can have a more exciting goodreads email!!

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Tarana

Shari, I knew about it originally because they used several of my own reviews. Apparently, the algorithm randomly selected those reviews where a 5 star rating was given. If you changed the rating to a 3 or 4, it eventually dropped out of the advertising page. Perhaps you remember the italicized review formatting Amazon had 3 years ago? Those are the reviews that came from Goodreads. The change to the 'verified purchase' may have changed how they do things. Don't know and I don't care enough to look them up.

Anyway, later on, I discovered an opt-out setting and selected that. If you look under your Goodreads Account settings, log in, select SETTINGS and then uncheck the box next to "allow partners of Goodreads to display my reviews". Wallah...your reviews are now limited to Goodreads and will not appear on Amazon.

Cinisajoy, I don't think I've ever had a pm from an author about my rating or review. Maybe I should read more books with living authors so that I can have a more exciting goodreads email!!

Interesting that you and Atunah have had such different experiences with your reviews on Goodreads.

I found that checkbox--I don't remember ever having seen it before. I guess most people have unchecked that box then, and that's why I'm not seeing duplicate reviews?

Shari

[Krazykiwi]

There is so much misinformation and misunderstanding on this thread, it's kind of funny.

Several years ago, before Amazon owned GR, they were one of the API partner for GR, and did display some reviews there IF you had checked the box allowing it. As did B&N, Kobo, Worldcat, Google Play, and quite a few other book sites. About 5-6 years ago, GR and Amazon had a big blowout, and Amazon revoked their agreement about book data (resulting in several hundred thousand book entries being blanked on GR to the despair of the librarians.) They also were no longer an API partner, and stopped displaying GR reviews.

Fastforward 3 years, Amazon turned around and bought GR. However (big however), they did not, and do not and have steadfastly refused to and repeatedly said they will not, import GR reviews to Amazon. The big reasons are that the rating scales differ (3 stars on amazon is "It was ok", which is 2 stars on GR), GR does not censor language in reviews, including profanity and explicit language - Amazon does, and GR allows images in reviews which some reviewers use really heavily, while Amazon does not.

So yes, up until about 6 years ago, some GR reviews appeared on Amazon, with permission (if you gave permission and weren't happy about it, then that's on you, isn't it?). Since then, and for the foreseeable future, they have not and won't. But they do still appear (again, with permission) on some other sites.

As for why people rate books they haven't read that aren't published yet, some people have said on the feedback group they use that to rate "degree of anticipation" so as they are notified the books are released, they've already got them prioritised which ones to buy if they have to pick due to budget or whatever.

Then there was the one lady who used the stars to indicate which bookshelf she had them on (or the floor), or what room they were in.

When you're talking books with a scant couple of hundred ratings, sure, that matters. When you're talking books with tens of thousands of ratings, the fact that most people tend to use the ratings more or less as intended, or at least on a "more stars is better than less stars" scale, pretty much drowns those outliers out, statistically.

Either way, a curated list of people who read what you read, like what you like, rate similarly to how you would and have opinions you trust, is super easy to make and then it's right there on every single book page you look at.

Still won't stop authors writing dud books, or things you just don't like though.

[4691mls]

(quote from Krazikiwi's post above) "Then there was the one lady who used the stars to indicate which bookshelf she had them on (or the floor), or what room they were in. "

I'm thinking of Cinisajoy's report of an author PM'ing about a negative review - just imagine that author PM'ing the bookshelf lady regarding a low rating, only to find out the bookshelf lady gave the book one star because it was on the first shelf, even though she loved the book......