Lisa the Librarian

I left an extended com­ment at Will Unwound: How many stars do you give the ama­teurs at Ama­zon?

I don’t have much more to say, but it is reprinted here:

I have been using Ama­zon since before I became a librar­ian to inform me about books. I think it mostly does a good job. It is pretty easy to tell if someone’s per­sonal friends or ene­mies have writ­ten a review.

They also reprint the pro­fes­sional reviews if they are avail­able, so why go to some other source to read them? I only use the “pro­fes­sional” lit­er­a­ture if there is no infor­ma­tion on Amazon.

That said, I take them with a grain of salt. I read the neg­a­tive and the pos­i­tive reviews. Some­times they are irrel­e­vant and it is clear from the review. (Exam­ple – I hate this publisher/seller so I am rat­ing the book down but liked it anyway)

I think that pub­lic reviews tell me what the “peo­ple” like. Pro­fes­sional reviews are good, but lots of really great lit­er­a­ture is unpop­u­lar reading.

One thing is that these are Review­ers and not Crit­ics. Pro­fes­sional librar­i­ans are Crit­ics, but the masses are Review­ers. In one of his books, Spi­der Robin­son quoted this (from some­one else) dif­fer­ence: “Crit­ics tell me whether a book is “Art”, but Review­ers tell me whether it’s damn good to read.” This is the power and beauty of Amazon.

It’s clear from social media that peo­ple trust friends and fam­ily more than anony­mous pro­fes­sional crit­ics, and Ama­zon is a ster­ling early exam­ple of this.

Also, why are pub­lish­ers and blog­gers doing all the promi­nent work on review­ing books and get­ting adults & young adults to read more? I fol­low sev­eral small scifi/fantasy pub­lish­ers’ blogs and the io9.com scifi blog. Io9 does book reviews all the time and they are run­ning monthly book clubs. They are part of Gawker media and get mil­lions of page hits. Let me repeat: they are run­ning monthly book clubs and review books all the time. And peo­ple are read­ing them every week.

On Book­list: who besides a librar­ian has even heard of it? The aver­age non-librarian prob­a­bly doesn’t even real­ize the local library can pro­vide them with recommendations.

The OPAC – lots of peo­ple have been writ­ing about how “bad” they are. Lots of peo­ple are scared of RDA and FRBR. But if I were your aver­age cit­i­zen and com­pared my library’s OPAC book info to Ama­zon ->no com­par­i­son. I would walk out of the library and not come back.