Recently, I blogged about the differences between browsing for book selections in bricks and mortar stores versus online. There's another difference I've noticed about selecting books digitally versus in stores and that is the way physical world recommendations work as compared with digital recommendations. On Amazon, for example, books are recommended in three ways: (a) the "my recommendations" section of my account; (b) when I look up a title, Amazon also tells me about other books viewed/purchased by people who liked this title; and, (c) the customer reviews section, including the average number of "stars" each book has received from readers.
It's the stars I'm interested in at the moment. I've noticed that often a book that is recommended to me by a friend, or that gets good reviews in the press actually doesn't get a lot of stars online or vice versa. This may be a case of TMI, but my own wetware algorithms struggle with how to internally weigh real world reviews against Amazon's star system. I do take into account how many online reviews there were: for example, a title with five stars may only have 6 reviewers if it's a new work or a work self-published by someone on Kindle. So my wetware algorithm may discount a high number of stars if there's a low number of reviewers. Also, I'll read through some of the actual customer reviews online, but this gets unwieldy where there are a lot of reviews, unless everyone seems to be saying pretty much the same thing about the book.
In a world of so many books to read and not enough time (can you see I'm still suffering from writer's block myself???), I need a better internal algorithm!
And in the vein of discussing my own summer reading projects, I would recommend The Memory Keeper's Daughter, although it's perhaps more drawn out than it needs to be, and I'm not sure about The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I haven't been able to get through it. Can anyone advise as to whether it's worth persevering?