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This post has been removed becuase I'm an idiot and interpretation of basic math eludes me without the second cup of coffee. Normal service will resume shortly.
I've been looking at
Amazon's Kindle product page since their whole debacle on removing books that users bought and downloaded to the Kindle without permission. It brings up issues of rights, ownership versus subscription and DRM.
As a result there has been an organized campaign to inform would be Kindle owners about this through Review on the product page.
As of writing, there are 5579 reviews, or which 3265 give it 5 Stars and and 795 have rated it 1 Star. There's plenty in-between but despite all this the average Star rating is: 4 Stars out of 5.
To me this didn't seem very accurate reflection of views, not off by much, but not quite accurate either.
Its not that Amazon is doing anything deceitful or playing with the numbers. The Star Ranking system is used almost everywhere, but I wonder how honest a system it really is.
To that end, I did a quick look at what the Amazon Kindle would be rated had it a Grade, A being highest, E being lowest. Using such a system the Kindle does poorly:
(Link)
Using plain Grades, Amazon Kindle scores 1 out of 5. a very significant difference?
I don't think a Grade system is the answer to giving consumers a good impression of a products worth. However I think the Star system, after a point becomes useless. I've been told, by people much smarter than I, that with enough reviews all ratings average out at 4 eventually (out of 5) - just browse Yelp long enough to see what they mean.
Or maybe I screwed up the basic math...