Abstract
Scholars, awards committees, and laypeople frequently discuss the merit of written works. Literary professionals and journalists differ in how much perspectivism they concede in their book reviews. Here, we quantify how strongly book reviews are predicted by the average book rating versus idiosyncratic reader tendencies.
In an analysis of 624,320 numerical and textual book reviews, the paper finds that the average response to professionally published books is not predictive of a random reader’s reading enjoyment. Online reviews of popular fiction and non-fiction books carry substantially more information about the reviewer than about the book itself.
Book evaluations generalize somewhat more across experienced review writers than casual readers, but convergence remains limited. The paper concludes that extreme perspectivism is a justifiable position when researching literary quality, bestowing literary awards, and designing recommendation systems.