Spreading the word: Elif Batuman and Amazon reviews

One of my favourite guests from last year’s MWF, Elif Batuman, has an addictive blog, the kind that sends you spiralling into an array of new browser tabs and furious online book-ordering.

A post from a couple of months ago recorded the author’s discovery that while her book The Possessed has garnered a number of five-star ratings at Amazon, it has also earned a large number of one-star reviews. The Possessed has been received well by critics, and Batuman wondered why reader reviews were, on average, less positive, guessing

that satisfied readers of a well-reviewed book are less likely than unsatisfied readers to post on Amazon.  One group thinks to itself, “Why should I write a good review when the Times already did,” while the other thinks, “Aha, a venue to express my outrage at the Times for hyping this book.”  I found support for this hypothesis in the fact that many particularly well-reviewed books tended to have relatively low reader ratings.  So… it’s the old dialectic of hype vs. backlash.

In response to this apparent reader proclivity, Batuman now writes five-star reviews on Amazon for books she loves. Thus far, she has lauded titles including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes and A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, another 2010 MWF guest.

There were two things that interested me about this pro-good-book activism.

First, how much is a reader persuaded by reviews, whether print or online, by paid critic or passionate reader, to buy a book? I read criticism, in the broadsheets, in literary magazines and online, and blogs dedicated to reading, but it’s just one element in a complex algorithm, something like: [(number of times title positively covered in book press/blogs + recommendations from friends) – books bought this week] x (is it in stock at the shop + price ) / how much am I in the mood for the genre/author = likelihood of buying book. (Don’t judge my maths.)

I don’t usually buy books from Amazon, so I’m not sure how much store a reader might set by an Amazon review (though an Amazon review by Elif Batuman might be a different story to the review by XXmishOz89). And there are of course countless other places to find out if readers have liked a book, including blogs (looking forward to using this book blogs search engine, via Galleycat) and recommendation-based social networking sites like GoodReads, Shelfari and LibraryThing (which I have studiously avoided due to its name conjuring up the image of a Muppet-like monster who lurks behind the Dewey number 833.01–913 stacks).

Second, do people talk about books they love as much as books they don’t love? At my blog, I try to write something about every book I read (failing miserably these days), however much I enjoyed it. One reason I’ve slacked off so much is that I’m often loathe to add to a heap of praise – what else could I possibly say about this bestseller or that local darling?

Do you heed book reviews and reader comments when selecting something to read? And would you take to the internet to recommend beloved books to fellow readers, or are you more likely to explain why you disliked a disappointing one in an online forum?