Limbaugh, Franken: Something in common?

People don't always judge a book by its cover. Often, they're more swayed by how many pages it has, a Dartmouth College professor studying Amazon.com's customer reviews has found.

Mikhail Gronas, an assistant professor of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth, wants to know why people read certain books, what drives those reading decisions, and what lies behind readers' reactions.

Gronas has been studying reviews posted on the retailer's Web site to get a quantitative measure of taste (from the number of stars assigned by readers to a book), along with a qualitative assessment (from the personal commentary provided by readers).

Readers often begin their reviews on Amazon by citing how many pages a book has, said the professor, who proposes that concerns about how long it will take to read a book impact what readers think.

Some of Gronas' initial findings are that conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and his liberal nemesis Al Franken get a nearly identical proportion of positive and negative feedback from readers posting on Amazon.

"Each of these books reflects opposing views, and probably they each attract a different audience, so you might conclude that they have little in common," he said. "Their grade profile, however, is remarkably similar. I suspect that books that have a high 'index of controversiality' are more likely to sell better."

Gronas further added that Harry Potter books tend to get a hyperbolic reaction: lots of reviews with a high proportion of five-star reviews.

The research was presented at the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages conference in Boston last month.

Classics are reviewed less frequently than best sellers, but are generally highly rated. Still, when it comes to Tolstoy's tome "War and Peace," readers tend to advise potential buyers to skip the transgressions about Napoleonic strategy.