How would you Rate a Book? Would you want to use or see a 5-star system, a 10-star system, maybe 6-Purple Thumbs, or 3-Flowers?
Short Answer? For reviews posted on this Blog, I'm going to be using a Monetary Based rating system. That is, taking into account how much the books are being sold for, versus how much I'd be willing to buy them for. I will tend to round to the nearest dollar.
Upside? It's a good way to track my actual like or dislike of a book. With the rating I'll post what I had to actually pay (or what the average consumer would have to pay) at the time I reviewed the book.
Downside? Monetary differences and Inflation can really mess up the rating system. If you want, just think of it as a 20-point Rating system instead. Why 20-point? I don't think I've ever paid more then $20 for a fiction book. Lately I grumble when I have to pay more then $12.
Long Answer:
As long as I've been reading reviews, I've always wondered why some places use the ratings system they had. Most commonly, it's a 5-star systems, with room for haves and possibly quarters. The few times I myself took up any sort of reviewing, I adopted this 5-star Flex system as it appeared to give me wide latitude in to how I perceived things. Then I ran into the inflexibility of some programmers.
For example, I've been on GoodReads for quite awhile, a website for people to review book, rate them, and share their lists. But while I've been a participant for quite awhile, one problem I've had always had with the website is their rating system. Specifically [GoodReads] uses a 5-star Flat rating system where you can pick 1,2,3,4 or 5 stars when rating a book, and nothing else. No ability to give it a half star, no ability to give it a zero. Just a 1-star to say you didn't like something, and 2-star or above to say you did.
On the other hand, [GoodReads] does then take all these flat ratings, and aggregates them into a 5-Star Decimal Flex type system, but the like of fine control for the reviewer does tend to aggravate a little.
So, when I started to contemplate posting my reviews to my blog, of course this discussion was one of the first things I began to contemplate. If I'm going to review a book, what type of system do I want to limit myself to? At first I thought that at the very least I would use a 5-star flex system, where I could feel more comfortable giving books degrees of like. Then I wondered why I didn't just go to a 10-star flex system. It would save on the half stars are be more honest.
Then it hit me; A 10-star system mimics pretty closely the price of novels costing lately. Rating books by how much I would buy them for, is actually easier then determining what someone thinks that book should be reviewed as. It's also a lot more honest as you get less spikes in the graph for really good, but minor works.
I further tested this argument by asking a few friends to try to rate a book. Then I asked them how much they might be willing to pay. Each time, the indicator or willing to pay showed a much stronger honest answer then the arbitrary 5-star system. I think I had found my rating system.
The easy part was over. Now I just have review these novels and revisit later how well this rating system works. Simple, right?