Commenting on Book Reviews

Is there a way to place rebuttal comments on another member's review of a book?

No. This is a deliberate choice. We want reviews to stand on their own, not serve as a locus for disagreement.

No. No commenting on reviews whatsoever, and even sites that have commenting limit it to those on friend list AFAIK

>1 Blythewood: Only by writing your own review with your points, without ever mentioning the other review.

>2 timspalding:

With the observation that one can flag something as "Not a review" if it truly isn't a review. (Which is needed, because a bunch of people put things like what they paid for the book in the review field.)

But I agree that it is good to not be able to comment on reviews. As others have said, write your own.

The one thing I do sort of wish is that there were a mechanism for giving more attention to serious reviews (note that I say serious reviews -- we don't need more "Ooh I wuv Harry Potter" reviews), especially on unusual books. The "Firsts" review feature is extremely unhelpful -- it shows dozens of reviews in languages I can't read, but has never, that I've noticed, shown any of the books where I've written the first review. Something is really screwy about that algorithm.

>5 waltzmn: On each work page, each review has the option to get a thumbs up for reviews you feel are especially good, and reviews can be sorted by votes. The more thumbs up, the higher on the list the review goes. If it has too many flags, it falls to the bottom of the list.

That said, a thumb does not counteract a flag. Two different systems

>5 waltzmn:

The one thing I do sort of wish is that there were a mechanism for giving more attention to serious reviews

I suppose the problem is the difficulty determining what constitutes a "serious review". As >6 gilroy: notes, you can give a "thumbs up" to a review you think is "serious" and sort reviews by that. But having a lot of "thumbs up" is no guarantee that a review is "serious".

>1 Blythewood:

Even calling out another review or explicitly disagreeing with it in your own is perfectly fine -- it helps other readers make informed decisions.

If you want to engage the reviewer in a conversation, you can use the LT message button at the reviewer's profile page. If you just disagree, it's best to post your own review.

>6 gilroy: On each work page, each review has the option to get a thumbs up for reviews you feel are especially good, and reviews can be sorted by votes.

I know, and thumbs up cause reviews to be rated as hot. But that's not what the original poster asked for.

>7 lilithcat: I suppose the problem is the difficulty determining what constitutes a "serious review".

Yes.

There is no good answer here, but understand that what I'm looking for is a system for assessing non-fiction books, or in a few cases books of fiction that try to address unsolved historical problems. Ordinary fiction is a matter of taste, and I'm genuinely not worried about that.

The one thing that would be possible would be to use length as a criterion (a review less than, say, 100 words isn't much help). Just having the ability to filter out short reviews, particularly on books with dozens of reviews, would help.

Don't get mad at me because I want a solution, because I know there is no solution here. :-) I don't want us to respond to reviews. But I understand the original poster's desire to rebut reviews. I'll tell you what bothers me. There are so many instances of people writing glowing reports about the only book they've read about a topic -- because they don't know how many errors it contains, because they've never read anything else on the topic. An example of this is Erik Larson's Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, a book with generally very positive reviews. However, those of us who have studied the story of the Lusitania in detail know that it contains many small but sloppy errors -- enough to make my teeth grate. Or there are three different fiction books "explaining" the famous rift between Charles Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll") and the family of Alice Liddell, Alice I Have Been, Still She Haunts Me, and Alice at 80. If any of the three authors had actually studied Charles Dodgson's life in detail (as in, for instance, reading his diaries, which have been published), they would know that one of their "solutions" is impossible and the other two extremely unlikely. Good reviews should note this rather than saying, "Oh! I never knew that." The reason you didn't know that is because it's not true.

Yes, I am an autistic perfectionist who hates lies. :-/

I don't think length is the right criteria. Personally, I skip (most of) the long ones. And the best example of a serious review by someone who does know his stuff is the famous "No!" Since I know that Tim does know about ancient literature, I don't need to know what he objects to, I know to avoid that book.

The best way to find serious reviews is to know which reviewing members are knowledgable about topics that interest you.

>10 waltzmn:

Don't get mad at me because I want a solution, because I know there is no solution here.

Oh, I don't think anyone is mad at you! Why would we be? I think it's just a matter of trying to think it through and figuring out where the problems might lie.

Length might work for non-fiction, although looking at the reviews of the book you reference, I see quite a few fairly long reviews, though I don't know whether they fall into the category of "people who don't know what they're talking about". ;-)

I do know that length is not always great for fiction; for some reason, people like to write reviews with lengthy and/or multiple quotations from the book.

Yeah, I don't find long reviews to be better than short ones. It's an online review, not a scholarly paper or newspaper article. I do try to carefully up-thumb reviews that I find to be helpful (well-written and thought-out, and not too long) but it's minimally useful since not many other people seem to be thumbing reviews

>10 waltzmn: I thought Erik Larson wrote historical FICTION. Meaning he's extrapolating based on his limited research. Not supposed to be right.
Then again, his entire writing style bugged me, so I never finished one of his books.

Honestly, fiction books are not supposed to get things right. They are supposed to guess and make things up, as close to the truth, without actually being true. So to complain that fiction books got facts "wrong" doesn't actually work. Plus you need to see when were the nonfiction sources published against when were the books written. (Not necessarily published, because some books are written over the course of decades and facts may change while the outline never did.)

This is not me being mad, this is me being confused because the prime examples are fiction and fiction isn't supposed to be factual.

And I agree with >11 MarthaJeanne: that length is not an accurate measure of a "good" review or a "Serious" review. People will summarize plot and never give an opinion, but still get six lengthy paragraphs. Plus "Good" or "Serious" is subjective to the nth degree.

>14 gilroy:

I thought Erik Larson wrote historical FICTION.

No, he writes what is know as "narrative non-fiction".

>14 gilroy: No, Erik Larson writes almost entirely non-fiction.

>10 waltzmn: Your point is partially the point I was trying to make, when you talk about "people writing glowing reports about the only book they've read on a topic." In this regard it might be helpful if one could comment on a review to say something like "have you read...." or "have you considered..." I readily concede, though, that in a open forum there is the risk that people could just be argumentative rather than constructive. I do feel that it would be helpful if a reader of a review could comment with "additional reading" or correct something about the book being reviewed (as opposed to criticising the reviewer).

>17 Blythewood: If you want to help people read better books on the topic, you can always add recommendations on the work page (in the Member recommendations section) - and there you can add notes on why you recommend it ("treats XXX better", "More factual representation of YYY" and so on). That shows on the same page where the reviews are (the work page) but without being connected to a review -- so it does not feel like an attack on the reviewer. Plus if that review is not on page 1 later, the recommendations are still always visible.

>18 AnnieMod:

Great point. Most of my recs are "two-way" for books that I think illuminate each other. But I do sometimes make "one-way" recs to steer people from an inferior book to one that is more useful and worthwhile.

>14 gilroy: And I agree with >11 MarthaJeanne: MarthaJeanne: that length is not an accurate measure of a "good" review or a "Serious" review. People will summarize plot and never give an opinion, but still get six lengthy paragraphs. Plus "Good" or "Serious" is subjective to the nth degree.

Let it be said that I agree with everything that is said here about the problems with long reviews. :-) Especially long reviews of fiction. :-)

But, for non-fiction, I do have a reason for wanting long reviews, and wishing I could filter for them. It is very often my task, in compiling information for The Traditional Ballad Index, to have to examine an historical (or, occasionally, scientific or economic or even theological) situation based on a handful of books, and cite those books, and potentially recommend those books for others interested in the particular song.

Very often, there are only a handful of books, often very old. They often don't have adequate descriptions -- anywhere. And it is often difficult to tell whether they are actually relevant to the situation or not. A long review may be boring as blankety-blank, and inaccurate to boot, but it gives information that can't be found anywhere else. A short review that says, "Great book" may be accurate, but for non-fiction, it's not a filtering device. :-)

So I would like to see the long reviews, because they're the only information I have. And I tend to write long, semi-scholarly reviews, because I'm writing them for people like me.

An alternative might be to look at reviews from reliable reviewers (e.g. I strongly trust things written by user setnahkt), or from people with similar interests. On the other hand, there are no libraries significantly like mine. (My favorite personal LT statistic is the one that shows the libraries most like mine. As of the last time I checked, the person whose library was most like mine -- had twelve other libraries more similar to his than mine was.)

>18 AnnieMod: If you want to help people read better books on the topic, you can always add recommendations on the work page (in the Member recommendations section) - and there you can add notes on why you recommend it ("treats XXX better", "More factual representation of YYY" and so on).

This is a good suggestion, but it can be abused. I can speak to this: One one of the books I wrote, The Gest of Robyn Hode, I recommended the three books I thought most useful for readers of my book. And someone thumbed them down! Now people have every right not to like my book -- for one thing, it's all about the pre-eighteenth century Robin Hood legend, which I would contend is much more likely to be the original than the modern legend, but which bears no relationship to the modern legend. So if you like the modern legend, then an edition of a fifteenth century text of it is of no interest. But surely the three most useful books for understanding my book are relevant to my book! If you don't like my book, give it a low rating. (I might even glory in it, depending on who gives the low rating. :-) But take my recommendations seriously!

>20 waltzmn: Anything can be abused on an open site. But being thumbed down does not hide them or make them disappear - neither it disappears their explanation. :)

PS: Reading your recommendation notes on the first 2 of these , they read more like a "Here is my source list and some lesser books to my superior one" than "here are some more books you can read and this is why, without tying them to the book your wrote and published". Plus someone may not realize that the book you are talking about is the one they are looking at - as "your volume on the "Gest"" may not necessarily be this one -- your LT name and your LT author page may be connected but people do not need to dig deep to discover that if they do not want to. So I imagine someone thumbed them down because of that. I know that was not your intent but someone casually glancing at them may see your recommendations as the ones abusing the system and not the thumbs down on them. The guidelines say "disinterested recommendations" and "Recommending your own book is strictly forbidden." and yours are veering close to breaking both of these at a quick glance and at face value without looking at who added them and so on - and often a quick glance is all you will get before the thumbs are pushed. :)

>21 AnnieMod: PS: Reading your recommendation notes on the first 2 of these , they read more like a "Here is my source list and some lesser books to my superior one" than "here are some more books you can read and this is why, without tying them to the book your wrote and published".

On reading in that light, I see your point and rewrote a little. It may not solve the problem, but it is perhaps a little clearer. Thank you.

I also find that the only review anyone wrote of the book was a quote of the description, so it had to be flagged. And it has a five star rating -- by my mother. :-( Oy. I wouldn't give it five stars; the editor tossed too much of it. :-)

Makes you wonder about all the other rarely-purchased books on the site.