Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Author rating statistics

I’ve added an author sub-page for “Rating statistics.” It shows all an author’s works, together with their ratings. In addition to the average (mean), it also has rating count, median, and standard deviation. You can click on a column to sort by it, and filter out books with few ratings—useful for more popular authors.

Check out some examples: Ann Patchett, John McWhorter, David Sedaris.

Labels: authors

7 Comments:

  1. Chris Lovegrove says:

    This looks fascinating and an invaluable tool. Aren’t statistics wonderful! Thanks very much for introducing this; I’m sure I’ll use it lots.

  2. David Kjellquist says:

    Thank you for including the standard deviation. So many times statical measures are provided without std dev and thus meaningless. It was interesting looking at the examples. Clearly pretty broad distributions i.e. alot of people light a book and a lot don’t .

    I recommend that for the statically challenged viewer you add a statement on the page like “2 standard deviations represents approximately 95% of the rating values”.

  3. waitingtoderail says:

    Awesomeness, been wanting this for a long time! Thanks Tim!

  4. elenchus says:

    Fabulous. Will there be a Talk thread for discussion?

    For now, I’d suggest adding the standard tick marks indicating which books I have in my various collections.

  5. Laura says:

    Love this new feature. I’ve often wished I could find the highest rated work for an author. The rating threshold option is great too.

  6. oregonobsessionz says:

    Thanks; another great feature.

  7. Nice feature. It would be even nicer if I knew how to find it for authors of my choice.

Leave a Reply to Laura