A book five star rating system

The first book I read was in 1988 “the animal farm” by George Orwell. To tell you frankly I did not enjoy it much because I was rushing for every couple of statement to oxford dictionary to find an explanation for a certain word. Though the book is writing in moderate English level but still my English level capacity was not supporting me. To get to the point my dad, a university teacher specialized in Semitic languages, asked me how did you find the book? In my country, because of politics, the country was super shut down to the world; there were no computers and no internet and NO RATING SYSTEM. I told my dad that the book was nice but a little difficult to understand as my concentration and mind gets disturbed whenever I find a word to fetch for in the dictionary.

Nowadays the rating system is part of everyday life use. When you buy any product, you rush to write your experiences with the product and to give it a rate. The rating system, whatever it is linked to provide several advantages: the product reliability, its durability, feasibility, and most important the purchase location. Every person in the world rates a product in a similar way, but there is a hidden reason that drives a person to buy a product rather than another and that is not the cost always. I prefer to buy apple mobiles because I got used to it and I know every detail about using it regardless of its high cost and sometimes it is annoying in security issues.

When I started my journey with self publishing and writing I read 25 books about self publishing and methods used to market and distribute my books as new author but not new to writing (holding two master degrees from UK). One of the powerful methods is to write book reviews on platforms that attract lots of readers and here I mention Goodreads and LibraryThing. I have found that writing a book review should cover various factors and criteria in order to serve the reader well. You can find my previous article about writing a book review here. After writing several book reviews, I found that even these criteria are not fair in many cases for an author who spends a lot of his valuable time to write the book because it affects his sales and book reputation widely.

According to the usual and my book review criteria, I have found that the rating system still needs reconsidering because it creates a loss for many authors. My first book review for an urban design book article here got 5 star rating. The urban design field is a multidisciplinary field comprises economics, politics, environment, engineering, architecture, landscape, and art. The author put great effort into covering all the disciplines involved regardless the percentage of coverage. At the end I have declared that this book is useful for individuals new to the field and students in university regardless of the 5 star rating I gave. Another book I reviewed also in the same field that got 3 star rating article here. When I read the book, I found that the author in many areas of the book is describing either the city he lives in or a certain environmental problem that the city faces from time to time. In one area of the book, he provides a practical framework for urban design work in practice from an environmental perspective which I found interesting. The third book I reviewed was about urbanism merely got 2 star article here. The book got low rating because I found that most of the book content is reused and could be found in other books as well as the ideas are regenerated to serve the subject of the book and the location of application.

Let’s look at the table below before I discuss the main factor that most readers should consider when reading a book review. The table below illustrates book content vs. its structure chapters. The book is about urban design.

Table 1 book content VS. book chapters

It is rational that the book reader should allocate more rating depending on how much the book has covered from the disciplines it is related to in all the book chapters. For sure as I did, when a book covers one topic of the field like environmental planning the reader allocates less rating. Meaning the more knowledge about the subject influence the book rating allocated as more knowledge will decrease the rating given to a book.

In analyzing many book reviews including mine, I found many book reviews regardless its short form or long form depends on one factor I could say (supply and demand). When a book supplies a certain topic in extreme detail and the reader, by chance or not, is looking for that type of knowledge and information that makes it very useful for him; according to that, the reader allocates a high rating for the book. This scenario I believe and I support to follow for every book review rating from any reader including me.

My book above link here: Architecture: Writing, Publishing, Marketing