Leaving feedback on Amazon...

[Warren_Paul]

Hi,

Sometimes people describe their ex's as trolls! My thought, not knowing either of these people, is that it's genuine. A stranger wouldn't come out with that personal stuff. But I could be wrong.

My real question though, is to wonder why they got divorced. I mean it seems to me that they were the perfect couple!!!

Cheers, Greg.

He specifically says in the introduction that he changed bits of the story and characters to avoid causing any dramas or getting himself in trouble. A lot of good it did him...

I suspect she is one of those people where no matter what you say, you can't win.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Obviously he should have started by changing his name!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Montero]

Never trust a 5 star review - nothing is that perfect.

I want to know the flaws, the problems, the criticisms - then I know what I have to deal with - whatever the product being sold.

This pulled me up a little the first time I read it, decided to come back and comment - in polite semi-disagreement.
I too want to know the downside of something in a review, but I don't think that 5 stars is an impossible target.

Reason is - used to know someone who amongst other things had the job of overseeing the marking scheme and the marks given for an GCE exam board. He got terribly frustrated that the examiners for art, english and history wouldn't use the full mark range. The lowest they tended to give was 25%, the highest 75%.
He'd say to them "could you expect a better painting from an O level student". "No" "Well give it 100% then!" "Oh we couldn't do that"

So I've got a bit of at "thing" about using the full mark range.

Continuing the thought in particular regarding context of the marks - at the moment I'm reading a military sf. These do tend to follow a formula to a certain extent, and don't often have a "hey that's truly original" moment, but in its classification it is pretty good, well written, interesting aliens, good storytelling, I like the characters and depending on how it ends I'd be varying between 4.5 and 5 on the review at the moment, as I'm enjoying it. Very likely to read the sequel.

But if you were to put it on a scale where to get a 5 it had to be a truly original piece of literature with astounding prose, then it would probably be a 3.

So now I want to add a button that says "great light entertainment" to my desire for a button that says "good but not to my taste".

 

[Vertigo]

I have exactly that problem when I'm scoring books in my own database. I read a cracking space opera that I thoroughly enjoy and give it a five. Then I stop and think is it really as good as some of the great classics I've read, for example something like John Wynham) and of course the answer is no, although they might both be SF they are, in fact, such different types of books that it's not reasonable to make that comparison. Now that is fine for my own database I can mentally make the necessary qualification, but it's much harder with a book I've not read being rated by someone I don't know.

I take those star rating with a very large pinch of salt and look instead for the review that can express the qualities of the book with considered words (rather rare I find!).

 

[thaddeus6th]

Argh. I keep forgetting to do this.

Amazon sent me a reminder about one book or other, and I could barely remember what I thought of it...

 

[HareBrain]

I missed Brian's comment the first time, but I agree with Montero. I'd give five stars to anything I judged to be better than 80% of stuff generally.

But one difficulty with the star system is that there are lots of different ways of approaching it. If you saw it as a scale along the bottom of a bell curve or normal distribution, only the top 1% perhaps would get five stars. And some people seem to hand out one star for each thing they like about it ("It gets one star for having a mongoose as the hero and another for the typeface" -- what they'd give a book with six good qualities they never say).

Others seem to think 2.5 stars is average, which, given that you can't give zero stars, it clearly isn't -- and others complain that you can't give zero stars, seeming to miss the point of a scale system entirely.

In short, bah.

 

[Parson]

My theory on stars
5 stars excellent
4 stars good
3 stars barely readable
2 stars don't bother
1 star abominable.

If we were going to rate only great literature I wold need like a 100 star system. ---- Hmm! Do I have the beginnings of an interesting SF scenario. How would a 100 star system work?

 

[Ursa major]

With FTL (Far-fetched Travel Literature)...?