Apparently, the amount of ratings on GoodReads.com is highly correlated with the ratings, at least for John Green’s four novels (r = .96). But is it really ‘the more, the merrier’? I picked four more authors (in a non-random fashion), had a look at the respective correlations for their novels, and made a couple of graphs to illustrate the results.
Novels by John Green, Maureen Johnson, J.K. Rowling, and Stephanie Meyer
The relationship is a negative one for Stephanie Meyer’s books. Two books of J.K. Rowling are outliers – her first one in terms of ratings on GoodReads, her most recent one in terms of rating. I therefore took the liberty to plot a quadratic fit (instead of a linear fit). It appears that John Green might be an exception (like the Mongols?) Also, Amazon.com ratings tend to be higher; and again, there is no clear relationship between the amount of reviews and the average rating.
And since I recently finished reading “On Chesil Beach”, here’s the data for Ian McEwan’s novels, along with a more appropriately scaled plot for Maureen Johnson’s books:
Novels by Maureen Johnson and Ian McEwan
By the way, the correlation between Amazon.com ratings and GoodReads.com ratings for the 40 books I used above is r = .89. The correlation between number of Amazon.com reviews and Goodreads.com ratings is r = .75.
PS: If anyone is interested in the Stata code for the graphs, let me know. I guess, I’ll add it here this weekend, anyway, but right now I should go to bed.
Category: Books, Data analysis |
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“Unquestionably the funniest song you will ever hear about THE FAULT IN OUR STARS.” –John Green
This ain’t a book about a ballet dancer
No, it’s a book about a book about cancer
But there is something that is more important
This book mentions Natalie Portman
In 3 out of 25 chapters – I think she’s pretty scarce
That’s the fault in “The Fault in Our Stars”
Yeah that’s the fault in “The Fault in Our Stars”
If you do the math then you will see
22 chapters without Natalie
The ones that mention her are way too short, man!
John Green should have added way more Portman
It wouldn’t have been as difficult as landing a rover on Mars
That’s the fault in “The Fault in Our Stars”
Yeah that’s the fault in “The Fault in Our Stars”
Wow, this is amazingly awesome. Favorited. And yes, this totally wins a book. Message me your address. Thanks for being awesome; this made my day!
How very flattering! A great way to start my week; looks like I’ll soon have Paper Towns. Then Hank Green‘s song The List will hopefully make sense to me. Meanwhile, I made a list of all the other books I sang about. The links are mainly to Wikipedia articles, because there readers can easily switch from German to their preferred language. Funnily, most (but not all) of my very favourite books ended up at the very beginning.
In response to John Green’s offer to give away a copy of his latest book Paper Towns I wrote a song about me not having said book. Yet. I have his previous two books, though. If you haven’t heard of John Green, I suggest you check out An Abundance of Katherines. It features eloquent German insults, but is ultimately a young adult novel. With math.
Writing the lyrics to this song was fun, because I could arrange the actual books accordingly. Once I had recorded everything I made a little video to illustrate this process – and also to clarify what I’m actually singing about.
Download “I Have Many Books (But I Don’t Have Paper Towns Yet)”: mp3 (more music)
I have the best German fairytale, the best Scholastic book
I have comedies and screenplays that are really, really good
I have My Heart So White and a book about you
About the end of the world and about aliens, too I have Looking for Alaska as you can see
An Abundance of Katherines belongs to me
I have many books from A to Z
But I must confess I don’t have Paper Towns, yet
I have books that sound dirty but are really all right
I have books that sound nerdy but are dirty inside
I have Reasons to Be Pretty, I have reasons to be smart
I have books about emotion but none about art I have Looking for Alaska as you can see
An Abundance of Katherines belongs to me
I have many books some of which are red
But I must confess I don’t have Paper Towns, yet
I have The Devil’s Dictionary and books about Gods
The complete works of Shakespeare, a book about odds
I have books that are funny and some that are sad
Some are amazing and some are rather bad
I love Catching Fire; I wonder how it ends
I have The Elements of Style in your pants
I have Looking for Alaska as you can see
An Abundance of Katherines belongs to me
And for full disclosure I also have The Fountainhead
But as of now I don’t have Paper Towns, yet
(words and music by Johannes Schult)
Category: Books, Music |
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