Baker Books always liked to hear what its customers were reading, and at some point in the early 2000s it stopped merely listening and started publishing. The result was a standing collection of reader-written reviews, gathered in the shop and posted on the store's website in three streams: adult, young adult and children's.
No reviewer is named in this archive. The original pages carried reviewers' full names and home towns, including those of teenaged readers. None of that is reproduced here. The programme is described; the participants are not identified.
How it was collected
The mechanism was almost aggressively low-technology. A customer picked up a paper form at the front desk, wrote a review by hand, and handed it back. Later there was a web form as well, but the paper one never went away, and it produced the better material — partly because filling in a form at a counter in a shop you visit weekly is a more considered act than typing into a box.
The store also lent out publishers' review galleys — uncorrected advance copies — to customers who wanted them, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a shop to do. It meant a keen reader could get at a book months before publication in exchange for writing about it. That is the deal a trade reviewer gets, offered across a retail counter.
How it was edited
Two published rules governed the programme, and both are sound.
Reviews were edited for length and, where necessary, for grammar and clarity. Not for opinion. The store said so plainly at the top of the page, which is the right way to handle it: a reader who submits four hundred rambling words and sees a tightened two hundred appear under their name has been served, not censored, provided the judgement is untouched.
No review was posted before the publisher's on-sale date. That is a trade obligation, taken seriously — the galleys were lent on the understanding that the embargo would be respected, and the store made the rule visible so that customers understood why their review had not appeared yet.
Why it worked
Customer reviews are now so ubiquitous online that it is easy to miss what was different about this version. Three things were.
- The reviewers were identifiable to each other. These were neighbours, writing under their own names in a town of moderate size, about books available on the shelf forty feet away. That is a considerably stronger accountability mechanism than a username.
- The store stood behind the publication. It was not an open comment field; it was an edited page with an editorial standard and a named business responsible for it.
- The subject matter was local supply. A review of a book you can pick up on the way out is a different object from a review attached to a global catalogue.
The young-adult stream deserves a note of its own. Getting teenagers to write about books voluntarily, in a form a shop can publish, is difficult, and the store managed a steady flow of it for years — which says something about the relationship between that shop and its younger readers.
Where it sat
Customer reviews were one of four recommendation systems the store ran, alongside the rotating staff picks, the long-horizon favourite-books lists and the standing Pick of the Literate subject bibliographies. Together they meant that a browser could get a recommendation from a bookseller, from another customer, or from the shop's institutional memory, depending on what they wanted.
For the wider context on how reader recommendation drives independent bookselling, the American Booksellers Association is the trade's own source, and the American Library Association covers the equivalent practice on the library side.