Hopefully this isn’t a dub question but I want to ask anyway. Keep in mind I’ve only started reading 2 months ago & haven’t read in 16 years so I’m new here. If books are subjective & everyone can have a differnt reading experience than the next person meaning what may be a 5 star book to you might be a 2-3 star to someone else & vice verse. So with this being said, what would be the point of the star rating scale? Is it just to see if in “general” do a lot of people like a book before you read it? Or is it just to show how popular a particular book is? Again don’t crusify me 😅 just curious.
by theron225
6 Comments
I agree with your points that not every book will be everyone’s cup of tea but in general I have found using Goodreads that anything under 4 and especially under 3.75 is usually just not something I enjoy or is worth my time.
A book’s star rating, but itself, is meaningless because of the lack of standard measuring criteria. People have one-starred a book because they didn’t like the author, for personal vendettas, or because it was in a genre they didn’t like.
So, I ignore ratings that are not accompanied by a text review that explains the reason for the number of stars.
Almost everything that can be rated is subjective – I’ll use restaurants as an example. My idea of a five star is a funky little place with spicy food. My mom’s idea of a five star is a gleaming chain where “spice” means parsley. There’s very little consensus on what five stars means. But we both have similar criteria for one star – rats, filth, hair in the food, seeing the staff washing food in the mop bucket.
So ratings matter more if they’re low, because more people agree on rock bottom than agree on peak
That’s actually a great question. The short answer is, the star ratings are useful for readers, but they’re pretty much there for the algorithms.
The long answer:
Ranking algorithms used by book websites need a way to sort search results. When a reader visits the website to browse or search for a book, the algorithms have to decide what to show them. The algos rely on data to determine what to show the user.
Qualitative data – such as a book review – is not an easy kind of data for the algo to parse. But star ratings? That’s quantitative data and very easy for an algo to parse.
As you rightly pointed out, the star system isn’t great data since it’s not consistent from user to user. But to an algo, it’s gold. Algos use it along with other quantifiable user data to try to make what is shown to the user relevant.
It’s a flawed system, clearly. But that’s pretty much why the star ratings exist as a feature. The algorithm uses them to try to guess what its users want. We readers use them too, to sort books, but I believe that’s a side-effect rather than the purpose. 🙂
I like rating books so that I can remember which books really worked for me. I normally remember the books that I loved, but sometimes I can’t remember others as well. The ones that I gave a decent rating to are ones I’m willing to recommend to other people.
I love rating books, but it’s 100% a personal thing rather than for other people. I keep track of my reading all year long. I like looking back on what I enjoyed, what I didn’t enjoy, etc. When I know friends or family have similar tastes as me it makes it easy to recommend a 5 star read to them.
Rating books is just a system that I enjoy incorporating into the digital scrapbooking/diary keeping that is my book tracking.