Does an ENWorld poll correlate to the Amazon rating?

[Jhaelen]

I'm also not surprised that the response here is more 4s and 2s than 5s and 1s, for a couple reasons. As mentioned, people who go review a product (on any site, and any product, not just D&D books on Amazon) tend to have something they want to say, which is generally highly positive or highly negative - more often negative, in my experience. Otherwise, why bother.

Yep. Amazon reviews have a tendency to be pretty binary.

I tend to ignore the 'extreme' reviews. The ones with 2 to 4 stars are a lot better to judge a product.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

That is a very interesting "inverse" bell curve. I don't think it's typical of an Amazon review spread. I think that this is an unusual case in that a lot of those 1 star reviews are probably as much pro-3E as they are anti-4E.

i.e. It's a by-product of the way a new edition replaces the old one, which isn't the case when an novelist writes a new novel.

As an irrelevent aside, I've had one one-star Amazon review, which consisted - in its entirety - of

Bad sterotypes (of RPG players and RPG characters) aren't funny in and of themselves, despite what the author may think. Boring. I realise that the author was trying to parody a bad RPG plot, but it wasn't humourous. There were a couple of funny scenes, but most of it was lame.​

...which gave me a 5|3|1 spread on Amazon.com (I have a better 5|5|4|3 on Amazon.co.uk) and which I answered thusly:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGWhKZjGuLw[/ame]