Week 5 Prompt - Reviews

    When someone is reading only positive reviews they will be much more likely to purchase whatever book they are reading about. And when only certain titles are being reviewed then those titles are the ones that are more likely to be added to a library’s collection. If you have ebook only titles that aren’t getting any professional reviews then I’m assuming those titles will barely be seen in library collections. The director at my library is the one who purchases all of the adult fiction titles for our library. When I asked her what resources she usually uses to help decide which books to order she said that usually she reads Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus, and Fantastic Fiction. I assume that those in collection development positions really rely on these resources to not be biased in the books that they review and include in their publications. So I think it’s important to have a wide variety of books in each publication and also a wide variety of those books being reviewed.

    When you are reviewing all of these titles, it’s important to have both positive and negative reviews for books available. Realistically, there will never be a book that 100% of readers love. Reading both positive and negative reviews gives you a clear look at a book. One review may rate it low because of the pacing and one may rate it high because of the character development but by reading both of those reviews you really are able to learn who the book would be best for and if it fits into your collection.

    My favorite place to read reviews is Goodreads. I use that more than any other site when I am looking for a book to read for myself. In my opinion, places like Goodreads and Amazon are really meant for the readers. If you are going to leave a scathing 1 star review of something, these are the places that it should be done. These websites are where you can search reviews for things that you yourself hate and love in a book to see if that book contains those things. However, if you are professionally publishing a bad review then I believe that they should be constructive and not so much written just to negatively bash a book.

    The reviews for The Billionaire’s First Christmas and the reviews for Angela’s Ashes were very different. However, both reviews give you good information on the books in my opinion. I know that if I picked up The Billionaire’s First Christmas that it would be a short, easy read and that while it probably has a predictable plot, it will be a clean read with a happy, cozy feel to the story. I also was given a synopsis of the plot. The professional reviews do a good job at giving a clear picture of what McCourt’s childhood was like and through those pictures you’re kind of able to see what the tone of that book is. So the way that the information was relayed may have been different, but I was still able to get the same information out of each set of reviews. I would be willing to add each of those books to my library collection. I do think though that since all of the reviews for Angela’s Ashes were so positive and there were no critiques on it, more people would be swayed to purchase that book compared to The Billionaire’s First Christmas.