Can We Trust Book Review Websites?
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- Goodreads, The StoryGraph, Amazon. They’re likely all the places you go to check book reviews before buying a book.
But as a resource for reviews and mass opinion, are they trustworthy?
// Resources in this video
Watch my Cait Corrain video - • What Not To Do When Wr...
Amazon review checker - reviewmeta.com/
Massive thanks to t34addict on Instagram ( / t34addict ) for your help and general awesomeness.
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What do you think?
My approach is to focus only on the longer book reviews, the ones that run into multiple paragraphs. Not only are such reviews less likely to be fake (because people who haven't read the book will have a hard time faking it for that long), but they end up going into more detail about why they think the book is good or bad, making them more useful. There have been times where a bad review made me want to read a book, and a good review made me want to steer clear, because the things the reviewer liked/disliked are things that produce a very different response in me.
That's very true. They'll also touch on specific things they like or dislike which doesn't mean the book is bad or good, it just means it wasn't for them. But because they've outlined those things, you can determine if you might like or dislike it instead
What I also miss is a DNF section with the ratings. A book can have a super high average rating, but maybe a lot of people have DNFed it. We don't know that, because generally people don't rate DNFed books. So hope they add that at some point
Yes! I didn't think of DNF at all but it's absolutely needed!
I believe TheStoryGraph shows people who have DNFed it
@@Luumus Yeah, it shows that the reader has DNFed, but doesn't show the percentage of DNF vs Read
I believe any type of website such as Amazon should not be trusted as more often than not the main motive of most sellers is to get whatever they might be selling on the first page, sellers usualy tell their friends and family to leave five or four-star reviews on their pages to boost their ratings. I think a better way to go about it would be to read the views left on such websites to see the quality of the products rather than the content of the book itself, then again this could be misleading as well. Platforms such as Goodreads also aren't 100% trustworthy as you mentioned in the video about review bombing.
There are so many precautions that seem like they're extremely easy to implement that these major platforms can add that could save authors from things like view bombing and save the reader from bad writing. The website might not have a way to confirm whether or not someone has an advanced reader copy too, but this can be fixed by simply locking a book from reviews until it is actually published and out for sale. Having the reviewers have things like what genre they specialize in or their average rating as mentioned sounds aswell! This could again, discourage people who review bomb. As someone who doesn't review much and only really does it when I want to add a special note for myself about the book I still believe that reviews that are overly vague should not be trusted.
I think what a reader can do instead of going to great lengths to figure out which reviews are real or not should be asking a friend who has already read the book or perhaps even ask a readers community online, but then again alot of people simply do not have that option, I myself do not have any reader friends. The best option in my opinion is reading four to five of the most popular reviews instead of going by star rating if the website has such an option and of course, watching reviews of the book online.
Some great thoughts! I think most people probably won't read reviews in detail, or sometimes will wait until after they've read it to avoid spoilers but some will for sure. But you're right, some of the things these platforms could do are quite small, or at least doable to prevent things like review bombing.
What you are proposing is what we would call in Engineering, a tag system. I agree. There should exist a tag system for the reviews, mostly because this would also allow us - users - to filter these tags and find actual reviews by people that either DNF'ed or read those books. I don't think the time frame for account creation would work that well. There are ways to bypass it, and also, review bombing can be done in more automated ways - which I really hope people haven't found out yet. I haven't heard of ReviewMeta, and it looks great. I'll try it later.
I don't use most of these platforms for checking (just for logging my books), mostly, I follow booktubers that I enjoy the content and usually grab recommendations from them. Monthly, I try to go to a bookstore and see if something catches my interest by reading summaries.
Ah yes that's true, I didn't think about DNFing at all. I've seen a lot of DNF reviews so it would be good to be able to filter them too.
2:07 you don't have to _purcharse_ the book to make a review, reading is enough, surely? ))
Yes of course. Another reason why a verification wouldn't work and a 30 minute or so window might