A book will receive different reviews based on its genre, format, and author. As mentioned in class, eBook-only titles are reviewed relatively infrequently in professional publications. This creates a problem for collection development, since many collection developers rely on professional reviews to help them decide which items to purchase, myself included. In fact, I rarely purchase an item without first checking both professional and amateur reviews. Granted, this is not the only tool they rely on, but it creates a significant disadvantage for one book to be reviewed prolifically while another is largely ignored.
The pattern that emerges is a confirmation bias: books that are heavily reviewed are more likely to be purchased by libraries, which leads libraries to only seek out similar books for future consideration. Works that may be a "perfect fit" for a collection are easily overlooked simply because they are not reviewed by professional sources that librarians consult.
Both of these reviews have dubious reliability: the Amazon review contains several run-on sentences and comma splices. It doesn't tell me much about the book beyond a vague plot summary and that the reviewer enjoyed it enough to give it four stars.
The blog review fares a little better, but not much: it provides a plot summary, which I suspect may have been provided by a publisher. The reviewer comments on how brief the book is and that it seems run-of-the-mill, giving it three stars.
Based on these rather lackluster reviews, I would be unlikely to buy this book for my collection. There doesn't seem to be much to set this short work apart from others of its kind. Considering the fact that it is holiday themed, and therefore likely to see less circulation year-round, I would choose buy other titles for my collection over this one (unless I received patron requests for this title in particular).
The sheer volume of professional reviews (most of which are positive, by the way) strongly encourages me to purchase this title. Combined with its 1997 Pulitzer Prize, its status as a #1 New York Times Bestseller, its movie adaptation, and its literary and cultural significance, it seems almost impossible not to include this title in my collection.
Now, certainly this isn't fair. Who could say which of the two is a better book? Who could say what it even means for one book to be "better" than another? Regardless of which book is "better," it is clear that the amount of reviews tends to skew a library's collection to favor the over-reviewed and slight the under-reviewed. Now, this sometimes makes sense: a poorly written book is unlikely to receive overwhelming numbers of reviews, regardless of its format. But how do we as collection developers correct for very well-written books that are skipped over by professional reviewers?
Perhaps we must adopt a more "biblical" approach: "I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks" (New International Version, Jer. 16.16). Librarians must be these "hunters," searching for quality literature out of the "crevices of the rocks," so to speak. (I am 100% certain this is exactly what the prophet Jeremiah was referring to when he penned this phrase.) A library's collection should offer a wide variety of options for its patrons, and this may require a collection developer to stray from the beaten path from time to time. Delving into genre-specific publications, for example, can help to flesh out the diamonds in the rough.
I'd like to drop in a note here about negative reviews: quite often, I find that knowing why someone didn't like a book is as important as knowing why someone else liked it. Often, a negative review can help inform me about a potential purchase.
That said, professional publishers should take care to avoid becoming cynical and derogatory; I can understand why some review sources adopt the philosophy that Thumper's father taught him in Disney's Bambi:
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| If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all. |