Visualizing The Wheel of Time

Friday, September 27th, 2013

I haven’t read the late Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, the Wheel of Time, but I’ve heard that it drags along in the middle books, which is what this quick visualization demonstrates:

Wheel of Time Ratings - Amazon

It’s more complicated than that though, as the additional data from GoodReads demonstrates:

Wheel of Time Ratings - Amazon vs. GoodReads

On Amazon, where leaving a review is an ordeal, there are far more reviews for the lowest-scoring books:

This suggests that the really low scores are actually a result of frustrated readers motivated to express their concerns, rather than a reflection of relative enjoyability or quality per-se.

Comments

  1. Guy says:

    “On Amazon, where leaving a review is an ordeal”

    What? Why?

    You select the number of stars, enter 20+ characters for your review and hit publish.

    I don’t do facebook, twitter or any of the other ‘social media’, but even I’ve left a few reviews on amazon.

  2. Isegoria says:

    The author of the cited post, James Siddle, notes how easy and natural it is to review a book on GoodReads versus Amazon:

    On Amazon, there are far more reviewers for the books that received the really low scores. This suggests that the really low scores are actually a result of frustrated readers motivated to express their concerns, rather than a reflection of relative enjoyability or quality per-se.

    GoodReads makes it extremely easy to submit a rating for a book — one click is all it takes. Amazon seems almost to discourage reviews — the “Write a Review” button is halfway down the page, and you must provide a title and description for your review. The net result being that input of everyday browsing users won’t be captured on Amazon — only motivated reviewers (such as the frustrated reader) will be bothered to jump through all the hoops.

  3. Guy says:

    “On Amazon, where leaving a review is an ordeal”
    and
    “… jump through all the hoops…”

    vs

    “…the “Write a Review” button is halfway down the page, and you must provide a title and description for your review…”

    Yes I guess my definition of ‘ordeal’ and hoop jumping is a little different.

    And yes, I realize that doesn’t invalidate the Amazon to GoodReads comparison, but still.

    ‘Inconvenience’ would be more accurate word to differentiate the two.

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