I love the reviews feature here, and I am so glad that so many people use it.  I love to read reviews of a book before I request it, and I try to go in daily and see what books have recently been reviewed.  I find so many things here that are outside of my usual genre that way.  Also if someone has posted a review that made me what to read the book, I check their shelf first to see if they have a copy instead of using the FIFO.

Does anyone know what happens when you give a review a thumbs down?  Does it count in any way?  Not that I do that very often, but if I see one that says something like “this copy has different cover” or “this copy is gently used”, I give it a thumbs down.

Anyone have any other tips for using the reviews?

I'm actually quite liberal with the 'thumbs down' option. Not only for reviews that are about the condition of that member's copy, but also for so-called reviews that are only a few words long. Reviews such as 'this is good' or 'this made me cry' or 'I hated it' or stuff to that effect. When I right a review, I give details that can help the potential reader of that book decide whether they want to read it or not. So I always give my opinions and I have evidence to back it up. A one sentence review is not helpful to me as a potential reader.

As to what happens to a review that gets a 'thumbs down', I have no idea.

I think enough thumbs down moves bad reviews down (like " I didn't read this") but it might only be if the good reviews get thumbs ups to move them to the top. 

Personally, I rarely read reviews anywhere anymore.  I've read too many books that everyone just raved about in reviews, only to find I didn't like them and couldn't figure out why all the rave reviews. And vice-versa,  a lot of books that had bad reviews that I loved.  The final straw for me to stop reading reviews on a regular basis was when someone spoiled a whole series for me by explaining in detail the main plot line of the series-who dies and in which book. Well why could I want to read that series now that I know the main characters of book 1 are going to be murdered in book 2? 

Yes, I love the reviews too -- excep tthe ons that are word-for-word the same as the book description.

I don't use the thumbs feature too often, unless there are story spoilers in a review; that really annoys me.  This is what the Help says on the 'thumbs' subject: 

If enough members click thumbs-down on a review, it will be hidden from view and only clicking See All Reviews will reveal it

Reviews are fine and they have led me to some Genre's outside of my comfort zone.  As Deb B. mentioned the "Mimic" reviews , the ones that parrot the rush for the book, are worthless and IMHO come from wanna be reviewers. 

I give them an automatic

-RD

Most books I like to read, there aren't many reviews. Not enough to form an opinion. I always go to Goodreads.com and read some good reviews, then read the bad ones to see what people don't like about it.

Margaret: I try to go in daily and see what books have recently been reviewed.

Where can you do that?

>>The final straw for me to stop reading reviews on a regular basis was when someone spoiled a whole series for me by explaining in detail the main plot line of the series-who dies and in which book.

Yes! I HATE that! Even jacket blurbs sometimes tell me more of the plot than I want to know.

I wish more people would leave reviews! I do like to see what my fellow members think of a book as opposed to professional reviewers. I have no problem with a short review -- I don't want to read paragraphs -- but I do want more than "this was good" or "I hated it!" I, too, have to go to Goodreads.com or Amazon a good portion of the time to find reviews.

I often will mark the reviews "Thumbs up" or "Thumbs down" after I have read the book, when I am re-posting the book, if I feel that a reviewer has accurately reviewed a book and I do "thumbs down" the ones that are not reviews -- get 'em out of here!

Like Margaret, I have discovered a lot of authors and books just by reading the reviews for the day. And I too will go directly to the person who wrote the review compelling me to request the book.

Rick -- on the Home Page, top left corner, it says something like Book Reviews or Most Recent Reviews and that link has all the reviews that has been submitted that day. Or you can use the Search pulldown menu at the top of every page to go to Member Book Reviews.

Rick -  I look at them from the home page.

A lot of the older reviews where it's just a book description are from before members could do book edits. People were encouraged to do a review with a book descripton on books that didn't have one. 

If you enjoy the reviews on PBS, then you should check the PBS Blog daily.  I have added 3 books on my wishlist because of the reviews and author interviews.  Today  - Author Spotlight on Roald Dahl - a great article. 

I agree with Mary, if a review was missing, members were encouraged to write one by using the description.  Thumbs down will move the review down a page if there are mutliple reviews. 

I'm afraid to read reviews because I don't want to read a spoiler,  so I don't read them often.  But I thumbs down all spoilers I find.  I've written a few but I'm not sure if they've been read.

Adrienne - I like to see that people have rated my reviews, but I don't review every book, only if I have something to say, or I feel the book needs to be noticed.  And spoilers are the worst!

I do not care for professional book reviews  because of length and spoilers but the PBS reviews are usually short and to the point. Exactly what I need to find a new book or author.  Many are humorous and they really make my day a little brighter.  Like many others though I avoid the overly long reviews and tend to keep to the short ones.  Bascially I just want an opinion of the book.

Question about the reviews: I've seen several reviews that don't have any stars on them, even when the review is giving glowing praise of the book. Does the no stars rating negatively effect the book?

Erin - I noticed that recently too.  There are often positive reviews with no stars.  I thought the system prompted you to do stars.

I think those reviews were from before you needed a star rating to get a book on your BIR.

A couple of years ago they required everyone to go through and give their BIR books a star rating.  The ones with a review but no star rating are probably no longer active members or people who didn't want to take the time to give a star rating. 

A review pet-peeve of mind are people who give a star rating that doesn't correspond with the review. Many times I will see that someone gave a book 2 stars but then their review makes it sound like the best book ever. Or they'll give it 4 or 5 stars and their review is nothing but everything that was wrong with the book. 

A review pet-peeve of mind are people who give a star rating that doesn't correspond with the review. Many times I will see that someone gave a book 2 stars but then their review makes it sound like the best book ever. Or they'll give it 4 or 5 stars and their review is nothing but everything that was wrong with the book.

I wonder if they do that so they get  FABIL suggestions of more books like that book even though they didn't like that particular book or vice versa?  We sometimes give our Netflix a higher or lower star than we thought of that particular movie because we do/don't want more like it.

I usually only read the reviews when I'm looking for a recommendation for my book club. I always read them here and at Amazon. What annoys me like crazy is when someone simply copy and pastes the exact same review in both places.

In fact, not too long ago I found that a PBS member was copying every review from Amazon. Dozens, if not hundreds of them. Must have been really bored.

The other thing that bugs me is when people just copy paste the book jacket info. Why bother? I don't care about spoilers, but many people do so I don't see why anyone would write a review that included major spoilers.  :(

I left a lot of reviews.  After a while I went back and looked and so few of them had been marked as useful that I decided not to bother.  If I happen to think of when when I'm making notes in my own journal I'll copy it over, but it's uncommon for me to do so anymore.

I find the reviews here very lacking for the most part. I usually open an Amazon page when I want to read reviews on a book I'm thinking about ordering. However, I really appreciate findng out that I can read the day's reviews from the home page here--I think I'll enjoy that and maybe find some new things to read!

I wish the reviews linked between paper back and hard back, it is funny to me how you can read the reviews listed under the one version on some books and they are glowing, yet flip to the other version and the reviews are brutal.  I notice that some people post their reviews under all versions of the book but that messes with my books I have read count.  I wonder why PBS does have them all tie in?  Now, on the other hand, for the audios, I like when the reviews are specific to the audio version of the book, often rating the reader and other details like that, so I guess it works the way it is set up.

I've never used the reviews here, but that's largely because by the time PBS implemented the feature, I had other sites that I got reviews from (BookCrossing and Librarything, mostly) and so it didn't really fit into my routine.