Amazon Adds New Review Options Via Drop Down Menus

If you’ve tried to review a book on Amazon recently, Amazon has added a few options for users when reviewing a book via drop-down menus.

Here are the choices:

At the bottom of the page it says: “Write your reviews using the traditional review authoring page” so this is a beta system. Time will tell if this will be helpful and/or abused. It could potentially lead to a more reviews, as it caters to people who might have trouble articulating themselves. Perhaps it will lessen the number of reviews saying “Loved it” or “Hated it” as the total review. Or, worse, those people who write reviews like, “This arrived to me undamaged.”

On the flipside, this could actually lower the quality of reviews if all people do is click these few boxes, which have pretty narrow criteria. I’m sure most writers don’t like their entire work whittled down to a few drop-down choices selected by Amazon. For instance, there are more than 6 moods to describe a book.

Another potential feature is discoverability: if you’re looking for a first person book with (or without) sex and violence, for example, you’ll be able to find similar books. That is, in theory. Currently, Amazon doesn’t have any way to sift through the different criteria. Options don’t show up here on the “All Reviews” page, or anywhere else:

Really, this seems in extreme beta at the moment and there’s no telling yet how or if this will work. There are no reviews at present showing this criteria, even on extremely popular books. We added a review to see how this would be displayed, but the drop down info didn’t show up. It is, however, an interesting development and possible game changer.

We’ll update as soon as we get more info…