Posted on Monday, July 30th, 2012 by Michael Steele
In the same way you use Rotten Tomatoes to check how good a film is before you watch it, iDreamBooks is aiming to become your first port of call in deciding what to read next.
iDreamBooks is a growing online library of book reviews, aggregated from top critics and publications. So if you’re looking for a new book to read but want to check out whether it’s actually good or not first, iDreamBooks may be the site for you!
We caught up with co-founder Rahul Simha to get the lowdown on exactly who the critics are, and how the ratings systems work:
“We help you discover the best new books by aggregating book reviews from critics like NYTimes & Washington Post. A book is “Must Read” if 70% of critics gave it a positive review. We also extract a sound bite from the review that summarizes the critic’s opinion.”
He then went on to compare iDreamBooks to Rotten Tomatoes, and in many ways that’s exactly what it is. Just like its movie counterpart, armchair critics are allowed to submit their own ratings and reviesws, but will only be featured if they have at least one year of experience in the field.
Each critic review is rated as either ‘must read’ or ‘don’t read’ and the percentage scored is based on the number of each type. For example if a book has 50 reviews and half of them are must reads and the other half don’t reads then the aggregate score would be 50%. This system assures fairness as no one review weighs more then another.
Next time you’re thinking of buying a book check how it rates on iDreamBooks to ensure that you don’t waste your money.
