Book Reviewing

Social reading site Goodreads recently infuriated some users when it announced it will delete reviews that focus on an author’s behavior rather than on the contents of a book. Goodreads, which Amazon (s AMZN) acquired earlier this year, has said the policy change is necessary for maintaining a civil community on the site, but on Wednesday it apologized to some users whose reviews were deleted and said it will send them the text of those reviews for their “personal records.”

One user who received such an email posted it in full on BookLikes, a competing site that has seen an influx of users who switched over after boycotting Goodreads due to its new policy. The email said that “we should have notified you and provided you with a copy of your content when we deleted the reviews/shelves” and added:

“We’ve discussed this in more detail with our engineers, and…

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Article: Amateur Book Reviews

12 October 2013 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that looks at amateur book reviews.

For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2013/10/09/defense-amateur-review/

The Value of Negative Reviews

28 September 2013 by particularkev

Whatever

Over at Metafilter they’re talking about this New Yorker article, in which book critic Lee Siegel explains why he doesn’t want to write negative book reviews anymore (here’s the MF thread). I posted my thoughts on the matter there, but it’s worth posting them here too. Here’s what I said.

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I was a professional critic of film and music for a number of years and I didn’t shy away from giving negative reviews when I felt negative about the work. But it’s worth noting that when I was doing that work, I wasn’t given the option of what work to review; particularly with film, my job was to review every film that came into town. With music, what I reviewed was mostly assigned, not chosen.

These days people are interested in knowing my reviews of books (particularly in science fiction and fantasy). By and large with books…

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