Are Some Books Better Than Others? An Analysis of Reader Responses

Scholars, awards committees, and laypeople frequently discuss the merit of written works. Literary professionals and journalists differ in how much perspectivism they concede in their book reviews. Here, we quantify how strongly book reviews are predicted by the average book rating vs. idiosyncratic reader tendencies. In our analysis of 624,320 numerical and textual book reviews, we find that the average response to professionally published books is not predictive of a random reader's reading enjoyment. Online reviews of popular fiction and non-fiction books carry up to ten times more information about the reviewer than about the book. For books of a preferred genre, readers might be less likely to give low ratings, but still struggle to converge in their relative assessments. We find that book evaluations generalize more across experienced review writers than casual readers. When discussing specific issues with a book, one review has poor predictability of issues brought up in another review of the same book. We conclude that extreme perspectivism is a justifiable position when researching literary quality, bestowing literary awards, and designing recommendation systems.</p>