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Depending on the book, I find the average ratings on goodreads are pretty accurate generally. I can't think of too many books I've read recently where I've disagreed too much with the average score, and a score below around 3.50 is usually a pretty reliable indicator (from past experience) that I'd only be wasting my time by giving it a chance. I know there's the attitude that we should read books for ourselves and not be cowed or prejudiced by the opinions of the masses, but in my opinion life is too short to read bad books: as someone once put it, "read all the best books now, because you probably won't have time later". The only exception to the reliability of the ratings, in my experience, is with "classic" literature, where the books invariably receive some middling scores that don't at all reflect their importance or quality. The reason, I suppose, is that a great many people are motivated to read these books for no other reason than they feel like they should, or that it would make them look clever to do so, and so they meander into these books without bothering to learn anything about its history, its subtext or how it came to be viewed as a "classic" in the first place and read it on the same level that they would any old mass-market paperback. For this reason, you'll get people downvoting such literature for completely superficial reasons, like Crime and Punishment because they "couldn't identify with the main character", La Nausee because "nothing happens", or Ulysses because the prose is "bollocks". With books that are less widely read (say less than 300 ratings) you can be relatively more sure that they have only attracted the people who know what they're talking about, so the average ratings are (again, in my experience) more reliable. Oh and my profile: http://www.goodreads.com/blurred
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Jan 30, 2012 12:13
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reflir posted:An ebook of House of Leaves would be better than a physical copy if it were set up like a wiki. I think this is one thing that I'm really looking forward to with ebooks, especially as the technology gets better and more widely accepted. There are some things you'll be able to do with ebooks that you could never do with a printed version and I think there really has the potential to forge new genres in the hands of creative authors. The ipad version of Dawkins' new book is a good example of what can be done with existing technology, but it's pretty exciting to think what else might come in the future.
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Mar 14, 2012 17:09
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