I am showing below the rating for a Kindle Single on an interview with President Obama. The overall rating is 3.3, but the distribution is bimodal. The link to the Kindle Single, which is free, is here.
A few thoughts:
Regardless of content, some people's political views are so biased that the content is irrelevant. That would explain the comparable rating for 5-star and 1-star. This lead me to suspect that the rating is more accurately reflected by the 4-star, 3-star, and 2-star counts.
Yelp rankings on restaurants also use a 5-point system, and the site also shows the rating distribution. I wonder if the 5-star and 1-star ratings should be equally discounted as well. The issue with Yelp ranking is that that restaurant’s service can change over time, and so a bi-model distribution can reflect restaurants changing from really good to really bad, or vice versa. For political books, time is unlikely to change extreme opinions.
