With the development of ebooks, reader reviews are becoming an important arbitrator of quality. Anyone looking for a book online will most likely read online reviews before buying. This gives reviewers an important role in book sales and with it comes responsibility. But, just like books, there are well written reviews and not so well written reviews, and I believe that as readers, to be fair to the author, we should evaluate the reviews we read. In order to do this, we need to consider the following. What are the responsibilities of a reviewer? They are responsible to readers who want an honest review and to authors who want a fair review. Is this an informal review or a formal review? An informal review is usually short and just says whether a reader enjoyed the book or not. This is completely based on personal likes. These reviews are meaningless to us unless we know that the reviewer likes the same books as we do. I put these sort of reviews on Goodreads for books that I’ve … [Read more...]