Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Librarianship & Information Science on 01/05/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709061 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online

On "My Moral Judgment"

My comment on Malikail and Stewart's (1988) paper. ‘’Moral Autonomy and Moral Training," shows that there are other possible meanings to the expression my moral judgment' which do not necessarily reduce to either ‘’judgment peculiar to me’’ or ‘’judgment of personal taste." Additionally, I show that concentrating on the public aspects/features of moral judgments while necessary is not all there is to the making of sound moral judgments. The paper proposes to include the self of the person as a necessary condition for judging the soundness of a moral judgment

A Place for Subjectivity in Moral Judgments and Moral Actions

In this paper, I try to determine a place for subjectivity regarding moral problems, specifically in making moral judgments and acting on them. This does not mean that I deny the necessity of some relevant objective grounds regarding moral matters. Rather, it means that, for purposes of teaching moral education (central among them that people will be enabled to learn how to govern themselves and how to exercise moral autonomy), it will not be sufficient to concentrate only on the objective aspects of moral matters. Furthermore, I contend that, if we take into account the cluster of subjective factors pertinent to the moral agent (or learner), some understanding of the common problem of gaps between one's moral judgments and moral actions can be generated. In this connection, I discuss Mordecai Nisan's concept of moral balance