Quit bickering about the death/rebirth/sickness/health of print book reviews. It’s time to think about digital book reviews.
As always, TeleRead leads the ebook conversation. The blog asked readers to imagine how a digital book review site could work, generating a stack of ideas. Technical writer Robert Nagle, British author Richard Herley, and developer Kevin Marshall all laid out their theories for the site’s infrasturcture–including a well-indexed group blog, an evolving wiki, and the use of “association tables” to aggregate ebook reviews.
Herley explained the unique problem:
“there is no shortage of reviews for most big publisher print books, but the books that desperately need reviews are those published direct to ebooks (and POD) from the small press. The utility of such a site has to be useful for the end user and IMO the end user (the ebook buyer) is the one who most needs the services of an ebook review site.”