What's this Blog about? The short answer it's an online site for me to practice my writing in place where anyone can critique it, occasionally mess with web pages and coding, and in general rant to the world without anyone caring.
Lately i've also embarked on a large project to read as many different authors across a much broader genre then I consider my home, and document my reactions to these books with short editorials and a subjective rating.
Which brings us to: How are you Rating these Books?
Most normal rating systems use something like a 5-star gradual scale, allowing half stars or finer if collating multiple reviews together. Realistically you could use anything you wanted, such as 10-stars, or 6-Purple Thumbs, or even 3-Flowers?
As I've been into ebooks for a long time, I was also very much aware of something that occurred in ebooks back in April of 2010 called Agency Pricing. Prior to Agency pricing, the publishers "sold" a license for the books to the websites, the websites then set the prices as they perceived for market demand. Like with any normal and healthy economic competition, this also meant that the same book might cost 10 US dollars on one website, while being discounted to 3 US dollars on another. With the fact that the actual platforms for ebooks were also widely scattered this caused what was perceived by the publishers as confusion in the marketplace. Beyond the confusion, there was also some issue with newer books being consistently discounted by one website that led publishers to believe it would soon dominate the market and impose it's demands on them.
So four out the five major publishers got together and told all the websites, we aren't going to just license these books to you anymore. Now you need to sell these books at the exact prices we say or we will pull all our books from you. Since so many publishers demanded this at once, the websites caved and the publishers took over defacto control of a lot of book prices.
What's come about since then, is that on average to the consumer ebooks, especially the popular ones, are now over priced. That is often the price of the ebook exceeds the price of a paperback. When of course there is less perceived materials involved, this causes some buyers to delay or not buy as many books as a whole. The publishers eventually re-learned the concept of loss-leader and are getting saner about pricing, but it's taking a long time, disrupting sales, and encouraging casual piracy.
Why this long spiel? Well for reviews posted on this Blog, I've gone to using a Monetary Based rating system. That is, I attempt to take into account how much the book are being sold for as an ebook, versus how much I'd be willing to buy them for. It's still a highly subjective system, sometimes won't make sense and strictly monetary differences and inflation can squeue the rating system. However it's still a neat project in itself.
Of course, 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.
Cheers
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