Let me start by saying that I don’t believe there is any such thing as a bad review. Any reader’s perspective, assuming he or she has actually read the book, is a valid one that an author should consider.
However, I do feel as if I’ve been a little bit unlucky with two of my first three Amazon reviews. I’ve gotten two three-star reviews, and the readers’ complaints in a nutshell were:
- The title was misleading, there was too much math and not enough physics. Now I’ll grant you that The Universe in Zero Words suggests a physics book. That was something that concerned me, so I added a subtitle that made it clear (I thought) that this was a book about mathematics too: The Story of Mathematics as Told Through Equations. This was part of a subtle balancing act by which I hoped to tip readers off that there is both mathematics and physics in the book. Be that as it may, the first reviewer was expecting a book on cosmology, and if that is what you are expecting, you probably will be a bit disappointed by my book. It is, for better or for worse, a history of equations.
- The second review is a little bit more annoying. In a 224-page book, the reviewer focuses exclusively on one page that contains what he calls a “serious error.” First of all, in my opinion it is not a serious error. The distinction between a function and its analytical continuation in general, and between the Euler and Riemann zeta functions in particular, is not one that I have ever heard any mathematician insist on. It’s true that you have to learn about this as a student. It’s not obvious at first, but then you learn to live with it and you move on. But in a book meant for a popular audience, it would be overly pedantic to spend time on this distinction. What really makes the review irritating is that this debatable point is the only thing the reviewer mentioned in the whole book! It literally seems as if he picked up the book, looked for his favorite so-called error and, having found it, discarded the book saying, “Obviously this author doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Grrr.
Anyway, I do want to encourage other readers to write reviews for Amazon and I promise that I will respect any and all reader opinions that are based on a thoughtful reading of the book. Because this is a personal blog, I also reserve the right to share my thoughts about any reviews, whether favorable or unfavorable or neutral. (In fact, I have already commented on one or two favorable reviews.)
