Professional and User-Generated Book Reviews and their Effects

Singapore.
The final speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Marc Verboord, who shifts our focus to the book market. Traditionally, book reviews in the conventional media had paramount authority; today, there are a number of alternative, peer-produced sources online - customer ratings and recommendations on Amazon, for example, as well as recommendations through social networking sites. So, is this part of a decline of cultural authorities? Does it democratise the market, from the grassroots up? Does it lead to (or result from) a larger, long-tail market for a wider range of books?

Marc is interested in testing the attention which books get online, in comparison to offline, and in the effect this might have on the commercial success of these books. His focus is on fiction, where he notes that male authors and general fiction (rather than specific genres) have traditionally had far more attention from newspaper reviewers.

For his study, Marc focussed on over 700 fiction books published in the US during February 2009; of these books, 10% had been reviewed in newspapers by May 2009, while over 70% each had been reviewed on Amazon and Goodreads. Newspapers continued to be somewhat gender-imbalanced (12% of male-authored books had been reviewed, compared to 9% of female-authored books), while the balance was much reversed online (around 80% female, 60-65% male). Similarly, genre fiction was reviewed significantly more exhaustively on Amazon and Goodreads (70%-80% of all genre fiction books) than in the newspapers (which were particularly reluctant to review romantic fiction). Both sides are also self-perpetuating - authors previously reviewed in newspapers had more chance to have their next book reviewed again, and the same applies for the Websites, too.

Does this also affect the commercial success of the reviewed books, then? Newspaper reviews don't seem to affect even the papers' own besteller lists; author track record does, and books frequently reviewed online also sell well online (though the causality isn't clear here - books may simply be reviewed online because they're already popular).

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