I posted yesterday about the rant I was preparing on the subject of review writing. The post you responded to, remember? This is that rant. It pre-dates anything you've said in my blog, although the conversation yesterday was useful and helped me clarify some of the things I wanted to say.
I have no idea what percentage of people read or are influenced by reviews. I do know that I personally will use reviews in certain circumstances, and that so do a good many of my friends. As mentioned at the start of the post, what switched me from muttering "I must write a rant" to blocking out a draft was going over to Amazon a couple of days ago to check out a book, and finding a load of willy-waving "I'm a bigger geek than the author" reviews of an O'Reilly manual -- reviews that did nothing to help me decide whether the book might be useful to me.
I don't buy/not buy a lot of books purely on reviews, but there are times when they are useful. I'm much more likely to rely on a review when it's a reviewer whose opinion I have some reason to trust. That doesn't mean "someone who agrees with me". One of the seeds of this rant was a conversation last year between some rascafarians in which one mentioned that she found another's reviews useful even though his taste in books was very different to hers, because he wrote thoughtful, accurate reviews which gave her enough information to decide whether she'd like the book.
no subject
I posted yesterday about the rant I was preparing on the subject of review writing. The post you responded to, remember? This is that rant. It pre-dates anything you've said in my blog, although the conversation yesterday was useful and helped me clarify some of the things I wanted to say.
I have no idea what percentage of people read or are influenced by reviews. I do know that I personally will use reviews in certain circumstances, and that so do a good many of my friends. As mentioned at the start of the post, what switched me from muttering "I must write a rant" to blocking out a draft was going over to Amazon a couple of days ago to check out a book, and finding a load of willy-waving "I'm a bigger geek than the author" reviews of an O'Reilly manual -- reviews that did nothing to help me decide whether the book might be useful to me.
I don't buy/not buy a lot of books purely on reviews, but there are times when they are useful. I'm much more likely to rely on a review when it's a reviewer whose opinion I have some reason to trust. That doesn't mean "someone who agrees with me". One of the seeds of this rant was a conversation last year between some rascafarians in which one mentioned that she found another's reviews useful even though his taste in books was very different to hers, because he wrote thoughtful, accurate reviews which gave her enough information to decide whether she'd like the book.