Are there new ways to supplement to the traditional rating systems?

What are badges?

Badges are distinguishing emblems or marks which signify certain membership, employment, achievement, etc. It can be a small piece of metal, plastic or cloth bearing certain design or words. Specifically, Reading badges are badges that apply to books or reading.

The readers’ wish

If you are a reader like me, you will always wish you can find an easy way to know the ratings of selected books when you visit book shops. The ratings will largely help us decide whether we want to buy the book to read or not.

The reality is that most people would need to go online to check on popular book review sites such as Amazon and Goodreads before they are comfortable to proceed with picking the book.

Are rating systems reliable?

Usually, these popular book review sites will encourage readers to write book reviews and accordingly give the books a rating. Take Amazon for example, you can give a maximum of 5 points (stars) to a book.

Due to their enormous book database, you can easily find the books you are interested in and read comments and ratings given to each book. Based on the ratings, you should have a basic idea of whether the book is desirable or not.

Arguably, giving a rating to a book is subjective as everybody has their own preferences and opinions. Expanding on this point, you may believe giving a rating based on subjective views can never justify that the rating is objective.

Nevertheless, my opinion is that you should also take a look at the number of readers commenting and giving the rating to the selected book.

As the saying goes, if most people agree to a certain view, then there must be something right.

The rating of a book would be more inclined to be objective when there are many ratings (be it good or bad) given to it. And if many people give a good rating to the book, the quality of such book is more or less guaranteed.

From this perspective, a rating system is a good reference in picking books.

Supplementing ratings with readers’ comments

Besides looking at the ratings, it would be wise to also have a quick read at what readers are saying about the book.

Many enthusiastic readers will write in-depth reviews in the comments’ section and you can get a basic idea on what the book is about, and whether it is consistent to what you wanted to read.

With the ratings and comments combined, you should more or less be ready to make up your mind for the purchase or not.

The 3 Reading Badges

Inspired by the rating systems, I wish I can offer values to readers like you at my site too.

I introduced a new badge system to the Book Reviews at Calm Reading. The purpose is to provide quick reference ratings on the quality books I recommended to readers.

Here are the 3 Reading Badges I will be incorporating for the time being:

How to use the Badges

I will include a badge icon on the top righthand corner of the image of every recommended book as displayed.

By looking at the respective badges assigned to the book, you will understand, even with a glimpse, about how this site rates the books.

I hope you can benefit from our new badge system which offers “quick and dirty” ratings in supplement to the more sophisticated rating systems outside.

What’s next?

This site is relatively new at the time of this post so the number of books covered are still limited.

My goal is to grow the site as much as I can so in future the site can cover a wide range of quality books.

I also aim to improve the badge system regularly and include more elements over time.

Please feel free to comment and I will endeavor to make this system a useful guiding reference to you and other readers who come to read about the books recommended.

Before you leave off this post, consider checking out our Book Reviews or our full list of recommended book list here.

Check out the badges assigned to the books and see if they work for you!

Read to enrich knowledge and enhance mentality. Enjoy reading.