Week Five Prompt Response

As an individual reader, I prefer shorter reviews. I'll usually be able to tell through the combination of the reviewer being someone I've learned to trust and what they have to say whether it's a book for me. The Goodreads reviews are usually not that long and if they are, I skim through them to get an idea of what the overall rating of the book is. The reviews that work best are those by readers who have read and rated similarly the same books I have, but that's not always a possibility.
   As a librarian, I think I would want a longer review to determine if the book is one appropriate for the collection.Negative reviews are just as valuable as positive reviews; if a majority of the reviews of a book seem to be negative, it may be a good idea to read the book myself to determine if it's worthy of being included (if I have that kind of ultimate power!) or have the staff all take a crack at it to see if we come to a consensus (if we had that kind of time!).
   I'm not sure how I feel about reviews on sites such as Amazon and individual blogs. There's no control over what gets posted, so in one sense it's the consumer driving the reviews and ratings, and hopefully those would be honest, but at the same time there's no way to keep trolls from driving down reviews or ratings just out of spite or because they're bored. The reviews for the Christmas romance e-book are rather bland and don't make me want to spend the money to add that book to a collection. This is the type of book I would probably wait to be recommended or asked for by patrons before looking further into it, unless I found other reviews.
   The reviews for "Angela's Ashes" all point to the book being of high quality and worth the read, even though the subject matter sounds depressing. It would be a good addition to a collection, not only as a memoir but also for the historical aspect of an "insider's look" at Depression-era Limerick. It's also a good tie-in with the film and would be good to have when film fans come looking for the book the movie was based on.
   It isn't fair for one book to be reviewed and another not, but then life isn't fair, and the book publishing and review industry certainly isn't fair. While it would be nice to have a fair review of every book that gets published, that's just not going to happen. This can affect the collection greatly as we tend to buy books that get reviewed rather than those that don't; it's simply natural that we can't honestly buy a book for a collection we haven't heard of or haven't seen reviewed. That would be a blind buy and is probably not a good practice in general.
   If a review source doesn't wish to publish negative reviews, that's their prerogative; as librarians we'd need to keep that in mind that whatever book we see a review for on, say, Booklist, will be at least neutral if not fully positive. We can use that in conjunction with other sites that do allow negative reviews to get a better picture of what the book is like to make a more-informed decision. Non-negative review sites remind me of social media sites that don't allow negative or critical posts about the subject or group; while some sites are for the enjoyment and appreciation of something and I can understand wanting everyone to have a good time as part of a group like that, fans of those subjects are also usually the most critical because they love that subject and that's when you get the best discussions, rather than just everyone saying they love it. The same would go with non-negative review sites. My response would be, "Okay, all the books on this site are liked; I don't have to read the reviews, then, or even waste my time on the site!" as I would already know the outcome. If a book doesn't appear on that type of site, then that's interesting and I'd investigate further.
   And I'll be honest that I usually don't use book review sites for choosing books to read. I've found my enjoyment or critique of a book is rarely influenced by someone else's review. Where reviews come into play is in the description of the book and if that makes it sound interesting enough to give it the first quarter of the book to decide whether to continue reading.