Filtering by Star-Count for Book Discovery

Is there a way to filter books by star level? For example, I just want to see books 4.1 stars or higher and at least 10 reviews for example?

This would make the sifting through possible next reads a lot easier as typically anything below 3.8 stars is usually a sub-par read I've found in my experience.

Additional feature which would be cool would be sort the entire index of LibraryThing for example, show me all books that are non-fiction category, 4.1 stars or higher, and at least 10 review or more. This would be amazing and sort from highest to lowest star rating for the results. This would be an incredible way to find high-quality books to read next in the category of your choice.

Is there any way to do this now that I am not seeing how to do on the site? Or is this something that can be done easily for users?

Would love to see this feature!

>1 wolfgang.smith: It may be technically possible, but the data is flawed as number of stars mean different things to different people (so highly subjective) and many people (like me) don't bother to add star ratings even if I rate the book highly. You'd need to read my review to find out how I rated the book.

So to take your example of non-fiction, I rate non-fiction according to whether it's a useful source for a RPG. If it's not - I'm reading it for a project - then I don't usually bother; I'm reading it to inform my mind.

I don't really see why such a sort + filter couldn't be available - we do have highest and lowest rated books in the Zeitgeist.

But it does tend to favor popular books, that is, those with a lot of copies. Many of us who do use star ratings like to keep 3 as an average, so the really good ones stand out. But you might not know if any one book with only a few ratings averaging 3.5 is fairly solid but not outstanding by my system, or full of errors that only some readers caught and mostly 5s and 1s. Not without having looked at the reviews (if there are any!)

I saw one book the other day with exactly one rating of one star, which seemed to be the member's way of indicating it's a good book.

For these reasons, in general, LT doesn't put a lot of weight on star ratings. But I think they can still be helpful if you're looking at popular books and not trying to find a specific topic.

Except I have one non-fiction book that's highly rated, and full of enough important errors to the point I had to DNF it. So maybe even for popular books, it's not very helpful without checking the reviews.

When you say at least ten reviews, do you mean at least ten ratings? Because that’s a much lower and seemingly more relevant bar. (A book with ten reviews doesn’t necessarily have any star ratings at all, though I imagine it’d be unusual.)

I just can't begin to relate to the perspective that wants to exclude obscure and unevaluated texts.

>1 wolfgang.smith: You can view and sort books by star ratings on an author page, but nowhere else.

While I don't believe in any kind of numerical line between "good" or "bad" books, I do find it useful to compare the ratings of similar books on the same site. The author page can also be sorted by standard deviation, which I find just as useful.

To add complexity but to increase the value of such data results, it would be cool if a filter was added to include just libraries you have marked as "interesting" and of course marked as "friends."

I don't think I would get 10 high ratings of any title if I did that, though. ha

I still think that feature would be helpful to a lot of users. A page to sort the entire database of LibraryThing by minimum amount of ratings filter drag bar (only show books >10 gilroy: ratings), then only show books with an average of 3.5 stars or more, then only show books in the non-fiction genre for example. Sure it would favor towards more popular books, but on average and in general, when I see books on here with a 4.4 star rating or higher for example and I decide to read it, it tends to be quite a good book for various reasons. When I read a book and it's say a 3.5 star rating with like 25 people who rated it, it tends to be a 50/50 if I will like it or think it's a terribly written book (this goes mainly for non-fiction genre).

I feel like this could be a relatively easy task to create a page for this with the features built in as all of the data exists in the database, and is just a matter of giving users access to filter books in descending order of highest star rating to lowest in a specific genre with a minimum number of ratings. Not sure how realistic this is but to me seems like something that could be done in an afternoon pretty much and help thousands of users discover new book options that other users highly praise. This also sets apart LibraryThing from GoodReads or Amazon since they don't have such a feature, and if users caught on that this tool exists, I'm sure the LibraryThing community would grow even larger which I think would be great overall.

I’d also like to see the ability to sort and/or filter by user star rating.

>8 wolfgang.smith: the entire database
Uh, you do realize that the site's total database is over 36 million unique works or over 246 million items cataloged, right? Do you realize the processor cycles required for what you're asking? The page might take a day just to create it. And many people who catalog books don't rate books at all, only write reviews. And what do you do with the person who thinks 1 star is a great book, but 5 stars sucks?

And what would take even longer would be convincing Tim that the ratings by themselves are meaningful enough to make this worth doing.

>8 wolfgang.smith: “This also sets apart LibraryThing from GoodReads or Amazon since they don't have such a feature”

Ever wondered why? :)