A Quote by Peter Morville
Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.
Related Quotes
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.
I don't hire any companies or ask any of my friends to write reviews for me on Amazon when I have a book come out so they can drive up my ratings on Amazon. I don't have a publicist.
In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery.
Writers are funny about reviews: when they get a good one they ignore it-- but when they get a bad review they never forget it. Every writer I know is the same way: you get a hundred good reviews, and one bad, andyou remember only the bad. For years, you go on and fantasize about the reviewer who didn't like your book; you imagine him as a jerk, a wife-beater, a real ogre. And, in the meantime, the reviewer has forgotten all about the whole thing. But, twenty years later, the writer still remembers that one bad review.
Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.
Librarians lend people books from the library. The best librarians are children's book librarians.
That's the miracle of Amazon! It's like Internet dating. In the early days, you could get slimed as an author on Amazon by someone bearing a grudge, or jealous, or whatever. And because there were so few reviews posted, this stank.
There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.
Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.
The handwritten pages make for fun giveaways. If someone reviews one of my books online, like on Amazon or Goodreads, they can notify me through my web site, and I'll send them an original page. They can see my creative process in all its scribbly glory.
I expected a lot of flak over my new book, '50 Things Liberals Love to Hate' from, well, liberals. It's not a big shock that the kind of liberals I skewer in the book - the radical, Che Guevara-loving type - have posted scathing reviews at Amazon and written nasty e-mails and voiced opposition to a book they haven't actually read.
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
I have earned wages as a waitress, a nanny, a librarian, a personnel officer, an agricultural laborer, an advertising secretary, a typesetter, a proofreader, a mental-health-care provider, a substitute teacher, and a book reviewer. In and around the edges of all those jobs I have written poems, stories, and books, books, books.
How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!
