Is leaving ratings on Kindle a new thing? Or have the ratings been sitting there and are now hitting the book pages.
I'm confused too. The total says "ratings" but I don't see any ratings among the reviews. Maybe they're calling reviews ratings now?
You're confused because it's another one of those changes Amazon made without any kind of announcement.
Ratings and reviews are two different things. The ratings without reviews people left on products, especially books, through their Kindle devices, weren't visible up until just recently. I believe there was another thread on the subject, but I forget what it was called.
Reviews are still the way they always were. It's just that readers on Kindle (and maybe some other ereaders as well) could leave ratings without leaving a review. Going forward, it appears that those rating will now be added to the review star totals.
Some people were reporting sudden, large increases in number of "ratings." I don't think Amazon is picking up all the old ratings, just the ones going forward. I hadn't noticed any on my books until this morning, when a one-star appeared on a book that previously had none. I thought it was a new review, but when I tried to pull it up, I got a "No reviews match your criteria," message. It has to be one of those ratings without a review from a Kindle device.
Currently, it's impossible to tell without looking whether a change in the number of "ratings" means a new review, an imported international review, or a new rating.
