Week 5 Prompt

I have posted two more documents in the week five files. One is two reviews of an ebook only romantic suspense novel, one from a blog and one from amazon. Look over the reviews - do you feel they are both reliable? How likely would you be to buy this book for your library?

Looking over the romantic suspense novel reviews, I think they are both good and bad for different reasons. The Amazon interview has a brief synopsis and some descriptions of how the book is written but it is entirely positive (I tend to not trust these kinds of reviews for a book’s quality, maybe that’s just me?). The blog review was not professionally written nor did it have any literary criticism to impart, but it was honest, and it sounds like a review from someone who read the book and is talking to someone else about it frankly and informally, without a stake in the book or the writing of the review. 

If it seems like something my patron base would be interested in, sure! I would buy it for my library. However, many people have e-readers now and if they could get it for free on Amazon I’m not sure the book would have as many circs. Is that an issue for popular free titles?

The other document contains some reviews of Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt, an incredibly popular memoir. These reviews are all from professional publications, feel free to find more on your own I just nabbed a few from the Book Review Digest database for you. How do these reviews make you feel about the possibility of adding Angela's Ashes to your collection?

I’m not sure why I should feel one way or another about adding that particular memoir to our collection; it isn’t really my feeling that counts, but the patron’s reading taste. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wanted a pleasant reminder of childhood nostalgia, but as a memoir it is very highly reviewed by professionals and was a bestseller for a long time, if I recall correctly. The statistical probability of it being popular is very possibly higher than others of its genre. 

Do you think it's fair that one type of book is reviewed to death and other types of books get little to no coverage? How does this affect a library's collection?

If all books were gained through professional reviews, or if reviews were mandatory references for by which librarians chose books, then it would be unfair and it would affect a library’s collection by filling it with disproportionately reviewed books over the lesser-reviewed titles. Do oft-reviewed books get bought more for library collections? 

And how do you feel about review sources that won't print negative content? Do you think that's appropriate? 

Personally, I don’t trust them, but professionally, I can’t see why they wouldn’t be appropriate—so long as the reader understands they won’t print negative content and there is a rubric defining what that means to that source (the ladies I know who adore the “Amish romances” would definitely say that “graphic sex” is “negative content”). Sometimes it is possible to understand the necessary information from a familiar writer because they’ll write around certain topics, or in a style that indicated what the reviewer disliked without saying it explicitly; I do think some negative content can be helpful because the reader may want to get a realistic picture of what they’re getting themselves into before committing to a purchase—or worse! What if they are the completist type, and would hate the book by the third chapter but feel like they had to continue? 

If you buy for your library, how often do you use reviews to make your decisions? If not, how do you feel about reviews for personal reading, and what are some of your favorite review sources?

I do not buy books for my library. As a reader, the only reviews I tend to read are personal recommendations, Twitter rants, or massive text blocks in my social media when a friend is mad about a book. Those are the best. If not, I look for authors whose writing I love—Neil Gaiman wrote a review for Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, but even that was a nice cherry on top; it didn’t affect my purchase of the book or my opinion of her writing in any way. It reflects more upon Neil Gaiman than it does Robin McKinley. Any reviews that use phrases like “engaging romp” or “tour-de-force” are immediately discounted. I do not appreciate those coded words reviewers use to describe books on back covers; they mean nothing and take up space. I would prefer a badly written or negative review to one with filler. If the filler-reviews and Amazon star-reviewers are all I can find on a subject, I visit Tumblr and An Archive of Our Own to see what the fans are interested in or mad about. Also—I’ll visit society pages for awards (the Mythopoeic Society usually has some interesting fantasy finds, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine is a good sampling of new authors; The Wednesday Club reviews and discusses comics and they openly acknowledge their biases).

To be quite honest, I didn’t realize I felt so strongly about this subject. I’m grateful to have more resources available to me to see reviews (I’ve honestly not spent much time on Kirkus or The Library Journal but I will in the future). I don’t think my personal book-finding techniques transfer very well to collection development, but I never expected they would.