Week 5 Response

 

I feel that publications who solely post negative reviews are only allowing viewers to see one side of the story. A negative review isn’t a bad thing, or at least it doesn’t have to be. There’s a way to be critical without simply hating on a book, however that can be something that’s quite difficult to distinguish between. Books and reading are things that people are passionate about, both authors and readers alike. It’s easy for opinion to overtake fact, for constructive criticism to devolve into spiteful comments about one’s writing or literacy skills. 

After reviewing the reviews for The Billionaire's First Christmas, I’m less inclined to trust the Amazon review than the book blog review. This is a surface-level decision, primarily made on the lack of grammatical clarity in the Amazon review. It’s also cleary in both reviews, although I think more apparent in the Amazon-based review, that those who are writing the reviews are into this type of Hallmark-adjacent romance books, which makes me a little less likely to take their review at surface value and would inspire me to do a little more research before looking to add this book to the collection, maybe going so far as to skim through a sample of the work.

My apprehension with ebook-only books is that there’s a lower barrier to entry to get into writing them, which is a good thing for the writers. This does, however, lead me to the idea that there’s a lot more low-quality work that you’ll have to sort through with ebook-only works versus those that have gone through the traditional release - more chaff to sort through. This is sort of a negative attitude to have but I do think that it’s still a lingering perception, like direct-to-video movie releases. I’m glad it provides a venue through which smaller authors can get their work out there, but it’s a little more like finding a needle-in-a-haystack. 

The reviews for Angela’s Ashes seem much more reputable and trustworthy than that for The Billionaire’s First Christmas, primarily because they’re coming from what I consider to be more trustworthy sources - Booklist and Kirkus versus Amazon and a book blog. But the reviews are also better written in quality and more abundant in quantity. 

Ebooks and audiobooks are one of the main selling points of the modern library. Public libraries have to be able to compete with apps like Audible and digital readers like Kindles. It’s definitely in a library’s advantage to have more ebooks in their collection. The trouble comes, however, with sorting through these ebooks. Reviews for ebook-only publications seem to be done more by genre-enthusiasts. My aunt reviews a ton of ebook-only Jane Austen spin-offs and AUs - my cousin and I call it her Jane Austen fanfiction - and she’ll release some scathing reviews of books that were written by anyone with a keyboard. As much as a trust my aunt, I think I’d have to take her reviews with more of a grain of salt than that of a published reviewer. There can e a ton of drama on those ebook review forums and it’s difficult to know which reviewers to trust.