The primary reason I like Goodreads is for the easy tracking the books I read. The second reason is the friend reviews.
Basically, bookstore website reviews are inundated with fake reviews. Maybe the author or publisher buys them or has people who have never read it review it. Maybe people are reviewing it based on their love of other works by the author. An easy example is The Winds of Winter having 4,482 five star reviews and the sequel A Dream of Spring. Neither book has yet to be finished. In both cases, my friends have the books marked as to-read.
The scores from these reviews go into a ratings score. Basically the formula is for each star multiply by the number given it and total it, then divide by the total of reviews.
((5*n5)+(4*n4)+(3*n3)+(2*n2)+(1*n1)) / (n5+n4+n3+n2+n1)
What I prefer is the rating score for a book based on my friends not general users. I place a higher weight on my friends. So this friends rating score is more valuable to me whereas I treat the existing one with such skepticism it isn’t useful.
At present, I basically have to go to the book, scroll down to the friend ratings score.
What would be nice is a browser add-on to move the friends ratings score to higher in the page to just under the title. That ought to be fairly viable.
What would be harder is for pages like the currently reading list, having the add-on visit each page, pull the friend rating and replace each “avg rating” with the friends avg rating.
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