Russian professor Mikhail Gronas is looking beyond academic literary criticism, scouring book reviews and ratings on Amazon.com to discover what they collectively reveal about the reading public beyond the individual opinions they contain.
Gronas contends that the patterns of reviews and ratings provide insight into the way the public reads books and the similar ways they react to comparable books.
"We are used to seeing books analyzed from above -- from the intellectual perspective -- but most people do not look for things like plot structure and rhetoric when they read," said Gronas. "In these online reviews you can see what people do look for when they read."
Gronas said that, for instance, a lot of reviewers start by saying how much time they spent reading the book and how the time passed, a phenomenon which indicates that, to many people, a book's value depends on whether it was a page-turner that took four hours to read or a chore that took four months.
The reviews themselves range from short caps-locked rants from "some dude in California" to "highbrow literary reviews that could go in magazines," Gronas said.
Statistical analysis of the one-to-five star ratings given to books, the second part of his research, shows remarkably similar ratings distributions for similar books, something Gronas calls "book taste consistency."
"Anna Karenina" and "Crime and Punishment," two Russian classics that Gronas is focusing on, have the same average ratings and practically the same distributions: about 90 percent fives and progressively fewer of each lower rating. Classics also always have a certain percentage of dissenters that aggressively reject the norm.
Furthermore, Gronas admitted that Oprah Winfrey's recent selection of Anna Karenina for her book club has inflated the ratings for the book recently. "Oprah is an important phenomenon, even in the book world," he said.
Other similar books like those of the Harry Potter series have similar distributions of ratings -- high ratings in Harry Potter's case. What are most surprising for Gronas, though, are the similarities between seemingly opposite books like "The Way Things Ought to Be" by Rush Limbaugh and "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot" by Al Franken.
"These two books are saying very different things, and they are read by different people, but they cause similar grade profiles, namely a high number of one stars and then about twice as many five stars," Gronas said. "This shows that there is an underlying similarity between these two very different books."
Gronas recently spoke about his research at the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages conference in Boston.
He hopes to complete and publish his research within the next few months.
