How would you find odd books?

[nancylebov]

The Amazon page for Gene Wolfe's has nearly equal numbers of one, two, three, four, and five star reviews, which is a structure I don't think I've seen before.

It seems like there should be a way of finding books which get that sort of reaction.

Comments

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

Something is a little hinky about the tag for the Gene Wolfe book.

I kinda feel that way about Gene Wolfe's stuff. I love the Urth of the New Sun stuff enough to reread the whole series every three or four years, but the rest of his stuff is all over the map.

[avram]

You left the "http://" off your link.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Fixed. Thanks.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

What a fascinating idea. There's definitely some additional signal to be mined in the spread of review ratings.

E.g. when buying commodity items from Amazon, I usually look for something that got a high average rating but has some low reviews -- and then read only the low reviews, to find out why. When looking for a book, it's more reassuring to see something that had a 4.5 average but lots of 4's and 5's, as opposed to something with only fanboy-5 ratings.

Too bad they don't let you search that way. Though I'm not sure how you'd specify it, from a user interface perspective.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I can think of a couple of interfaces. One would simply have a few patterns that one hopes are popular.

Another might be to have the customer enter the values or curve they want to see, possibly with an option for how much wiggle room to be allowed.