Most Owned Un-Reviewed Books

Does anyone know if there is a list of most cataloged on LT books without a review?

I'm pretty sure there's not but I'd like to see more stats about books with reviews and without, the one you mention would be a cool one.

That would be quite interesting, and might provoke some reviews for those books!

Damn fine idea!

> 3

I can't say that I'm all that enthusiastic about provoking reviews.

I see a lot of so-called reviews that seem to have been entered just so there would be something in that space. I can't say that I want to encourage the proliferation of less than one sentence long reviews such as Simply a classic., One of my all-time favorite books, not appealing to me , The great American novel, and the like. (All these are actual full "reviews" on this site.)

>5 lilithcat:
You have a point; I was visualizing something with more content than that. One can but dream ...

Well, perhaps it won't be a regular part of LT. Maybe a member of the LT inner circle might post a listing into a group discuss thread. That way it won't attract as much attention from the 'one sentence reviewers'.

If there was a way to attract their LT inner circles attention...

There's the Go Review That Book! group. It's not exactly the same as what you mention, but a lot of people (myself included) seem to make their selections based in part on which books don't have any (or many) reviews.

My most-owned book with no reviews is Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by W. B. Yeats (715 members) and Medea has only 1 review and it's in Norwegian.

Also over 500 members with no review in my library: The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (538) and The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle (515).

What do other people have in their library?

My most-owned book with no reviews:
Knitting on the Edge with 765 owners.

Hunh. Never would have expected this one.

Martin the Warrior has 1199 people, but only 2 reviews, and both of them six words or less. The highest I can find with zero reviews are the Bantam Spanish & English Dictionary, with 313 members, and Harbors and High Seas by Dean King, with 309. Highest fiction book with no reviews is Here There Be Dragons by John Peel (a Star Trek novel), at 194 people.

Going to a random member's library, I found the highest in his with no reviews is
Blow-Up: and other stories by Julio Cortazar (560)

Next one:
Knitting Around by Elizabeth Zimmerman - 591 members.

Surprised again; EZ's books are among the most highly thought of knitting books, so why hasn't anyone written a review??

Can anyone beat Knitting on the Edge with 765 owners and zero reviews.

>14 misericordia: Sure
I'm only looking at books with between 1000 and 500 - but a random member:

Marlfox by Brian Jacques (779)
The Damnation Game by Clive Barker (741)

If you sort you library by Shared you can easily find the highest held book with no reviews, in you library. So random is nice, but what would be interesting is the most widely held book with no review.

So at this point it is Marlfox by Brain Jacques, which is pretty surprising.

I haven't seen anything over 800.

My highest is Knitting on the Edge by Nicky Epstein (766 copies, no reviews, 113 ratings averaging 4.19 stars)

I don't have the Zimmerman book mentioned by staffordcastle in #13. But my next is another by Nicky Epstein, Knitting Over The Edge (575 copies, no reviews, 83 ratings averaging 4.12 stars)

The Story of Civilization, Vol. 6 The Reformation by Will Durant (484 copies, no reviews, 20 ratings averaging 3.88 stars)

The Story of Civilization, Vol. 5 The Renaissance by Will Durant (478 copies, no reviews, 20 ratings averaging 3.84 stars)

Iacoca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca (456 copies, no reviews, 54 ratings averaging 3.54 stars)

The Story of Civilization, Vol. 8 The Age of Louis XIV by Will and Ariel Durant (429 copies, no reviews, 18 ratings averaging 3.94 stars)

The Story of Civilization, Vol. 11 The Age of Napoleon by Will and Ariel Durant (387 copies, no reviews, 22 ratings averaging 4.11 stars)

The Americans: Vol. I The Colonial Experience by Daniel Boorstin (356 copies, no reviews, 29 ratings averaging 3.88 stars)

The Americans: Vol. III The Democratic Experience by Daniel Boorstin (328 copies, no reviews, 27 ratings averaging 3.93 stars)

What conclusions can be drawn from this?
1) Knitters are apparently too busy knitting, and have no time (or patience) for reviews.
2) Many people acquire The Story of Civilization because they believe they “should” read it; once acquired, they find it too daunting to read any volume in its entirety (although browsing a single chapter can be quite enjoyable).
3) Nonfiction history readers would rather read than review?

Whew, I was beginning to think that only knitters refrain from reviewing.

Nice summary, oregonobsessionz! ;-)

Well the focus of LT has moved to CK.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/56280

5> I wonder how much questionable data this will generate in the wild pursuit to get data into the CT?

The Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus - 874 copies

I had to get pretty deep into my library to find the first one ... 18 pages in there was:
The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History with 423 copies, The Ophiuchi Hotline with 415 copies, Greek Tragedies, Vol. I with 412 copies, all with no reviews, and on p.19 there was The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner with 392 copies, and on p.20 there was T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems with 348 copies and no reviews. After p.20 (representing the "most popular" 400 books out of my current 1,805), the review-less titles started coming about 3/page (including ones that surprised me like a Carlos Castaneda book and Lenny Bruce's classic How to Talk Dirty and Influence People!).

 

>21 BTRIPP:

Ha! In order to review Castaneda, one would have to admit to reading him in the first place!

Re. #22:

I have all his books, and have reviewed the ones I've read in the past five years or so. Maybe I should pick up a set of his early books (which I read back in highschool) for a re-read and a series of reviews!

 

Shifting through the enthusiasm I find the following:

The Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus (874)
Marlfox by Brian Jacques (779)
Knitting on the Edge (765)
The Damnation Game by Clive Barker (741)
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by W. B. Yeats (715)

Does anyone have an un-reviewed book with more than 900 owners?

A little while back a few of us made it a "game" of sorts to find and review these types of books (most commonly shared with no review):

http://www.librarything.com/topic/45143

I would definitely like to be able to sort my library according to number of reviews. Gotta love statistics that almost sorta kinda mean something. :-)

One of the things I am interested in, is this; If you arrange the books in library thing from most held Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (39,405) to least held or 1, (of which there are very very many. Possible even more than 39,405). Then over that graph you superimposed the number of reviews for each given book. Could you map a curve to the the number of reviews? So, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (39,405) has 381 reviews or about 1%. If this holds true and is a linear curve, then Twilight with owners 14,576 would have 145 reviews. It does not, it has 794 about 5%. Since reviews can be neg or positive this is more a measure of desire to comment. Which is interesting. So to approximate this curve, the point where a widely held book has no reviews is an important point.

So at this point a book with less than 874 owners and better than 43 reviews would be very unusual.

26>That would be really cool to see.

As the number of owners goes to one I wonder how many of those books have reviews? How many books with 2 owners have 2 reviews? 3 with 3 reviews, etc. Of books with many reviews how many of those review have been "flag" or marked helpful. What does the curve for number of reviews per day since published for a given book look like. Do the number of reviews for a book increase as the release of the movie of that book is released...

I have to be careful not to get obsessed with statistics that almost sorta kinda mean something. :-)

:-D

>25 PhoenixTerran: I checked that thread out a while back and determined Isle of View by Piers Anthony is my most widely shared book with no reviews. I put it on my challenge list to get to sometime this year and planned to report back to the thread. However, by the time I get there it may no longer be unreviewed.

A little bit of tweaking of data on the Zeitgeist page for reviews and top 1000 books I found the following.
Title:Author:Owners:Reviews:Percent
Twilight:Stephenie Meyer:11749:565:4.8%
On Chesil Beach:Ian McEwan:2607:127:4.9%
Uglies:Scott Westerfeld:2614:128:4.9%
Special Topics in Calamity Physics:Marisha Pessl:2853:141:4.9%
The Road:Cormac McCarthy:7503:381:5.1%
Nineteen Minutes:Jodi Picoult:3013:153:5.1%
Water for Elephants:Sara Gruen:6567:338:5.1%
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel:Diane Setterfield:4943:286:5.8%
Breaking Dawn:Stephenie Meyer:4437:259:5.8%
The Book Thief:Markus Zusak:5445:339:6.2%

These books would seem to have invoked a greater number of people to review them.

This data required a significant amount of tweaking to get, so its accuracy is little more than a very good guess.

Then on the low end of the usable data was the following surprises...
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:J. K. Rowling:33304:240:0.7%
The Unbearable Lightness of Being:Milan Kundera:7991:57:0.7%
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:J. K. Rowling:32362:230:0.7%
The Scarlet Letter:Nathaniel Hawthorne:9602:68:0.7%
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:J. K. Rowling:32135:223:0.7%
The Silmarillion:J. R. R. Tolkien:10602:72:0.7%
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:J. K. Rowling:32604:221:0.7%
Hamlet:William Shakespeare:9114:56:0.6%
The Fellowship of the Ring:J. R. R. Tolkien:14169:82:0.6%
The Return of the King:J. R. R. Tolkien12615:62:0.5%

There are many books with lower percents, I just couldn't cleanly get the data off the Z pages.
In addition, the Z pages are definitely out of date.

I'm sure there is a decreasing incentive to write a review when the whole world has read the book - difficult to find something original to say about Hamlet - but less common works provide a more worthwhile task. So how many 'ultb' have been reviewed by their proud owners? 4 out of my 30 reviews are for 'ultb' (admittedly one is really a description and another very brief).

I am pretty sure the Hamlet is interesting in actually having so many reviews. The J.K. Rowlings books to be so low is interesting. The Stepenie Meyers books I thought would have had a similar, can I call it "hype index", to the J.K. Rowlings books. But the real tearsure in this calculation are:

On Chesil Beach,Ian McEwan
Special Topics in Calamity Physics,Marisha Pessl
The Road,Cormac McCarthy
Nineteen Minutes,Jodi Picoult
Water for Elephants,Sara Gruen
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel,Diane Setterfield
The Book Thief,Markus Zusak

I haven't seen if these the reviews are positive or negative. But either way a higher percent of people find the books worthy of comment. Of this list I had never heard of 5 of these books. I am not the most worldly person but I certianly don't live under a rock.

As to the ultb (with or without the tag.) with reviews that would be an interesting number to be sure. I believe, I have review of 4 of my 15 ultbs.