I don’t think its right that one type of book gets reviewed
all to pieces and other books get ignored. This can impact the library
collection by increasing requests for “Best Sellers” because they have read a
good review about it and they are the only books they are seeing reviewed. Then
your collection has a large number of one type of book or too many copies of
one book that will have to be weeded later on down the line, all because these
are the books getting reviewed publicly.
I don’t think it is right to only print positive reviews
because not everyone has a positive experience with a book. It's important to show
both sides it will save people time and keep them from reading books that aren’t
their taste. The only place I do not think this applies is on the book itself because
these reviews are meant to help sell the book. I think reviews are important for me
personally because I do not purchase for a library. I read reviews as well as
summaries when deciding what to read next. I check the reviews on the book, I
know these are generally only good reviews meant to sell the book, but it is a
good highlight of what people liked about the book the best. When
the reviews and summaries line up to something that sounds like my taste, I
will check out the book. I also like to skim the first couple pages of the book
as well to see if I like the writing style.
I liked how you mentioned how you look at the reviews and summaries before reading a book. Making sure the writing style matches up with what the book leads readers to expect is a great thing to do. But I'm also guilty of blindly automatically reading a book if a favorite author recommends it, or if one of the devoted Goodreads readers & reviews rates it highly. Do you do anything similar? And I think this is a similar mentality for ebook readers, especially of romance books; it's a beloved genre with devoted readers who will automatically read as many as they get their hands on. If we can get books for cheap as ebooks, I think libraries are justified in adding such books often to the collection.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. If I only see positive reviews, I don't immediately think that the book is good, but (more likely) that the author or publisher paid off a bunch of friends. Getting outside of authors I'm already familiar with, I'm definitely going to be looking at the reviews or at least make sure the synopsis is something I think I want to spend some time with.
ReplyDeleteFull points!
ReplyDelete