Why most Amazon books get rated 3 stars or above
2 min read
·
Feb 27, 2024
A 2021
study
found that a whopping 91% of books on Amazon are rated
3 stars or higher
? meaning nearly every book in existence is average, above average, or even excellent. That can’t be true, can it?
Reputation inflation
happens to varying degrees in most digital marketplaces: You feel pressure to give your Uber driver five stars, to rate that dingy Airbnb “
above average
,” or to clap 50 times on your friend’s Medium post. As a result, ratings tend to become more inflated and irrelevant over time, especially on peer-to-peer platforms where leaving a negative rating could reflect poorly on you.
Ratings are a bit more honest on platforms that are not peer-to-peer: Yelp, Amazon, or Goodreads, say. But those sites suffer an equally vexing problem: fake reviews. A few months ago, fantasy author Cait Corrain lost a book deal after she was caught creating
an army of fraudulent Goodreads accounts
to give herself five-star reviews and pan her competitors. On Medium, novelist and book editor
asks whether it might be time to
abandon Goodreads altogether
. Trolls, scammy reviewers, and “
review bombing
” (tons of fake negative or positive reviews) abound on the Amazon-owned platform. That’s not to mention the site’s
notoriously janky UI
.
That 2021 study did find one accurate predictor of sales: not star ratings, but
highly emotional positive text
(i.e. effusive first-person statements like “I LOVED THIS BOOK, it changed my life”) within the first 30 reviews on a book’s Amazon page. I think that’s a little more difficult to fake. AI could probably do it, but we can all tell the difference between an AI-written rave review and a human one… right?
What else we’re reading
- , co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, identifies
three of Taylor Swift’s tried-and-true growth strategies
: creating artificial scarcity, adding time pressure, and pricing her product well below its market value. Any entrepreneur can learn from these Swiftian tactics. Randolph writes:
“The trick, as Taylor showed us, is
not
to match supply and demand, but to purposefully fall short.”
- I recommend bookmarking this short but lovely glimpse into “
fossil words
,” i.e. obsolete words embedded within common English idioms. This story is a reminder that
every word contains an imprint of its history.
One example: The “step” in “stepchild” is a vestige of the Proto-West Germanic word
st?op
, which comes from the Greek word for “bereaved.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Setting your phone to grayscale
removes neurological rewards
while preserving almost all of its utility-based value.
