Today, we look back on the incredible selection of books our members have reviewed for First Impressions during the year - 45 titles in total.
Reader reviews abound on the web these days but it's difficult to know which to trust, especially when there are businesses who will arrange for glowing "reader reviews" to be posted and other reviews may be written by well-meaning family and friends.
BookBrowse's First Impressions program offers you a source of trustworthy reader reviews because only BookBrowse members can post reviews. Members indicate which books they're interested in but cannot prioritize, and copies are assigned by BookBrowse's algorithms. So, while it's conceivable that somebody connected to the book might be assigned a copy, the chances of there being enough people to influence the overall consensus is effectively non-existent.
What better way to be sure a book is going to be right for your book club than being a fly on the wall at a real discussion - such as for the fifteen books we discussed in BookBrowse's Book Club during 2017 (with more than 3500 comments posted), or any of the approximate one hundred books that we've discussed over the past few years!
Dear BookBrowsers,
BookBrowse's annual Best of the Year awards are an excellent barometer of great reading. The awards are particularly noteworthy because voting is only open to BookBrowse subscribers - so no vote stuffing by rabid fan bases; and instead of just voting for a book (which favors the most widely read books) subscribers rate each book they've read that is on the shortlist, and the winners are the books with the highest overall rating. Such considered selection results in truly outstanding books being feted every year. 2017 is no different in that regard. Over 7,000 votes were cast on 67 books (12 nonfiction, 51 fiction and 4 YA).
