Tossing It Out

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

What If Everyone Who Read Books Had to Review Them?

Books in the Douglasville, Georgia Borders store. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a recent post at Tossing It Out I asked the question "What If You Wrote a Book That Nobody Wanted?" Here is the comment left by Christine Rains:

Great post. It's hard to say who will like what. I've hated books that were best sellers, but loved ones that nobody is interested in. I'd love for a lot of readers to like my books too, but I'm in a little niche at the moment.

In my reply to Christine I speculated:

I'm the same way. Sometimes I think a lot of people who buy the best sellers don't even really read them. People have a tendency to jump on a bandwagon and just do what they think they're supposed to be doing because everyone else is. If everyone was required to give an honest book report/review on the books they purchased, I wonder what the Amazon review section would look like.

This got me to thinking a bit more about this scenario. Thinking back to our school days most of us probably recall having to write book reports on books we'd read or worst of all for many of us, we were required to stand in front of the class to deliver the dreaded oral book report. I wonder what would happen if everyone who read a book was required to give their personal review on the book.

Now, to disallow any discussion about the cheaters who might not really read the book or give disingenuous reviews--since some of you like I did sometimes merely skimmed the book or read the CliffsNotes style summaries and managed to get by with a passable book report--let us postulate that everyone was honest about their reading or there was a credible way of being sure that books had been read. Let us also discard any notion that people would stop reading to avoid book reports. In our fantasy scenario everyone would be required to read X number of books per month and present an honest review/report on each one.

Using our imaginary society of readership model, would we see less 5 star reviews on Amazon? Would the majority of books that are now published never make it to the market because of a fear of receiving poor reviews? Would the best-seller lists look different than they do now? Would this society see the emergence of smarter more discriminating readers?