Since Amazon started letting people rate books without writing anything, some of my older books have been getting more ratings. Something I noticed is that for older books, these new ratings can be weighted quite a bit more than ratings already given years ago. Like this for From Warrior King to Peasant Girl:
You see there was a 5-star and 4-star review from 2016 when the book released. For years that's all there was. Then some dick came along last year and gave it an anonymous 1-star rating. As you can see, that anonymous 1-star rating with no words (and who knows if it's even a verified purchase) is now 47% of the rating!
If you look at where it says "how ratings are calculated" notice that it says one factor is how recent a review is. So it seems like a logical assumption that because this one-star rating is 5 years newer it gets weighted a lot more than a 4-star review that doesn't say verified purchase and more than a 5-star review that is a verified purchase.
But really, how does that make any sense? The book is the same as it was 5 years ago, so it shouldn't matter whether someone's review is newer or not. I understand where that might matter for something like a toaster where a newer review could relate to a newer model, but books are pretty much static. Time should not be a factor.
Poking around Amazon, they put that same message on all their products, which is the problem. Well, two problems. One is that they aren't up-front about how they calculate these things. Two is if they are using the same model for every product. Like I said, that model might work fine for household products or electronics or something like that, but it doesn't make sense for books. It makes a little more sense for music or movies where you get different formats or maybe a "deluxe version" or "director's cut" or something like that where if they don't have a new product page you might get old and new reviews lumped together for different versions.
But books it still doesn't really make sense, especially when the book is in the same format it was 5 years ago. It would be nice if Amazon were more transparent about how they're calculating these things and actually didn't just apply the same formula to everything. But I doubt we'll ever see any change on either of those things.
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1 comment:
That is just wrong. Another thing I don't like about the ratings on Amazon is that you can't tell how many are ratings without reviews unless, of course, you start counting. One of my books has 59 ratings, and I'm not going to bother. I can only guess that they switched to allowing only ratings to make it easier for people who don't like to write anything. That probably includes the majority of people in the world.
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