Leaving feedback on Amazon...

[HareBrain]

I missed Brian's comment the first time, but I agree with Montero. I'd give five stars to anything I judged to be better than 80% of stuff generally.

But one difficulty with the star system is that there are lots of different ways of approaching it. If you saw it as a scale along the bottom of a bell curve or normal distribution, only the top 1% perhaps would get five stars. And some people seem to hand out one star for each thing they like about it ("It gets one star for having a mongoose as the hero and another for the typeface" -- what they'd give a book with six good qualities they never say).

Others seem to think 2.5 stars is average, which, given that you can't give zero stars, it clearly isn't -- and others complain that you can't give zero stars, seeming to miss the point of a scale system entirely.

In short, bah.

[Parson]

My theory on stars
5 stars excellent
4 stars good
3 stars barely readable
2 stars don't bother
1 star abominable.

If we were going to rate only great literature I wold need like a 100 star system. ---- Hmm! Do I have the beginnings of an interesting SF scenario. How would a 100 star system work?

[Ursa major]

With FTL (Far-fetched Travel Literature)...?