Why most Amazon books get rated 3 stars or above

A 2021 study found that a whopping 91% of books on Amazon are rated 3 stars or higher — meaning nearly every book in existence is average, above average, or even excellent. That can’t be true, can it?

Reputation inflation happens to varying degrees in most digital marketplaces: You feel pressure to give your Uber driver five stars, to rate that dingy Airbnb “above average,” or to clap 50 times on your friend’s Medium post. As a result, ratings tend to become more inflated and irrelevant over time, especially on peer-to-peer platforms where leaving a negative rating could reflect poorly on you.

Ratings are a bit more honest on platforms that are not peer-to-peer: Yelp, Amazon, or Goodreads, say. But those sites suffer an equally vexing problem: fake reviews. A few months ago, fantasy author Cait Corrain lost a book deal after she was caught creating an army of fraudulent Goodreads accounts to give herself five-star reviews and pan her competitors. On Medium, novelist and book editor Daniella Gaskell asks whether it might be time to abandon Goodreads altogether. Trolls, scammy reviewers, and “review bombing” (tons of fake negative or positive reviews) abound on the Amazon-owned platform. That’s not to mention the site’s notoriously janky UI.

That 2021 study did find one accurate predictor of sales: not star ratings, but highly emotional positive text (i.e. effusive first-person statements like “I LOVED THIS BOOK, it changed my life”) within the first 30 reviews on a book’s Amazon page. I think that’s a little more difficult to fake. AI could probably do it, but we can all tell the difference between an AI-written rave review and a human one… right?

What else we’re reading

• Marc Randolph, co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, identifies three of Taylor Swift’s tried-and-true growth strategies: creating artificial scarcity, adding time pressure, and pricing her product well below its market value. Any entrepreneur can learn from these Swiftian tactics. Randolph writes: “The trick, as Taylor showed us, is not to match supply and demand, but to purposefully fall short.”
• I recommend bookmarking this short but lovely glimpse into “fossil words,” i.e. obsolete words embedded within common English idioms. This story is a reminder that every word contains an imprint of its history. One example: The “step” in “stepchild” is a vestige of the Proto-West Germanic word stēop, which comes from the Greek word for “bereaved.”

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Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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