Week Five Prompt

Look over the reviews - do you feel they are both reliable? How likely would you be to buy this book for your library?    

    

I feel that both of these reviews are reliable, at least to an extent, because they seem to have been written by people who are regular readers of romance; one mentions that they “do love a good Christmas romance” (Cataldi, Ebook Only Romantic Suspense Novel, n.d.a) and the other mentions that the plot of this book is “a very common story” (Cataldi, Ebook Only Romantic Suspense Novel, n.d.a). Their seeming familiarity with the genre would cause me to place more reliance on their reviews. Both reviewers seemed to feel positively toward the book overall, even though the blog reviewer also included some criticism of it (Cataldi, Ebook Only Romantic Suspense Novel, n.d.a), so based solely on these two reviews I would probably be likely to purchase the book for my library.

How do these reviews make you feel about the possibility of adding Angela's Ashes to your collection?

Reading these reviews, which are overall effusive in their praise for the book (Cataldi, Angela Ashes Reviews, n.d.b), would make me feel like it was a must to add this book to my library’s collection. None of these reviews says anything negative about the book, but rather they only sing its praises and compliment the author’s abilities (Cataldi, Angela Ashes Reviews, n.d.b), which would definitely lead me to think it should be added to the collection.

Do you think it's fair that one type of book is reviewed to death and other types of books get little to no coverage? How does this affect a library's collection?  

I don’t think it is necessarily fair that some types of books get more coverage than others, but I think it will probably always be the case and librarians should be aware of it when using reviews to make purchasing and recommendation decisions. I don’t know a lot about how the book publishing industry works, but my assumption would be that if a book is published by a large publisher or is written by a well-known author, it will probably get read and reviewed a lot more than a book that is self-published or published by a much smaller publisher due to publicity and promotion of the book. This probably causes library collections that are built primarily by using book reviews to end up being filled more with books from larger publishers and well-known authors and to possibly be missing some really great books that had less coverage.

And how do you feel about review sources that won't print negative content? Do you think that's appropriate? 

I think if a review source is completely upfront with readers about the fact that they don’t print negative content, it is appropriate for them to not do so. This is because I think people who are utilizing the review source to decide which books to read or to recommend to patrons, or to purchase for their libraries or themselves personally, should know to expect that all reviews from that source will be positive. Otherwise, a person could end up with a skewed impression of how positively a book has been reviewed overall. Other than that potential issue, I feel that it is appropriate for a review source to not print negative content if they are looking to focus more on the positive aspects of books, but I’m not sure how helpful that type of source would be by itself for making practical recommendation/purchasing decisions. 

If you buy for your library, how often do you use reviews to make your decisions? If not, how do you feel about reviews for personal reading, and what are some of your favorite review sources?

For personal reading, I don’t tend to read formal book reviews. However, I often look through informal reviews on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Goodreads to help me decide if I want to read a book or not. Because I tend to read more non-fiction than fiction I am less concerned about this than I would be otherwise, but one of the downsides I see to reading these informal reviews is that I think it is more likely to encounter spoilers in informal reviews than formal ones, which would make me wary of reading too many of them for making my own personal reading choices in fiction.

Works Cited

Cataldi, E. (n.d.a). Ebook Only Romantic Suspense Novel.

Cataldi, E. (n.d.b). Angela Ashes Reviews.