Bookner

For people who haven't heard of it yet, Bookner is a peer-review website that, instead of helping writers to get feedback on their work (which is nice, but there are a ton of other outlets for that), tries to get manuscripts into the hands of agents.

Basically, you submit your manuscript and agree to review the work of others. Reviewers assign a rating to the work, and agents are notified about the highest rated manuscripts. Sounds great, right? I think that, in theory, it's a fantastic idea. Unfortunately, there are two things that, in my opinion, are fatal flaws for this upstart.

My problems:

The reviewer doesn't actually have to read your book. On their FAQ, the response to "How do I review a manuscript?" is as follows:

This is very easy. Just pretend you are at a bookstore, either a physical one or an online retailer like Amazon. You are checking out books to try and decide whether you might want to buy them.
Amazon let you read the first few pages; you might want to do that. Or you might do the electronic equivalent of flipping through the pages, by browsing a little here and there and scanning the pages.
If you have spent a little time with the book, you should be ready to answer some simple multiple-choice questions. The questions have been designed to be easy to answer yet still indicative of your opinion - your feelings - regarding this book. You will be asked about 10 questions, all of them multiple choice.
Reviewing a book can take as little as 15 - 20 minutes. Unless, of course, you get engrossed to the extent that you end up reading the whole thing.

Now, I'm not going to be one to say you have to read an entire book to realize that it'll probably be good, or probably be bad, or anything like that. Working as an editor, you quickly realize that you don't often have to eat the whole egg to find out it's rotten. So, what's my issue? Well, it's the fact that you're expected to give an accurate review after only fifteen minutes with a book. Now, maybe these ten multiple choice questions are so mind-blowingly insightful that my fears will be allayed, but I'm doubtful. Furthermore, there's no evidence, as of yet, that the reviewer even has to look through the book at all - theoretically, they could just mark down a bunch of random answers. I'd like to know how exactly these reviews will be verified.

Issue number two - Most people out there are pretty decent, but there always seems to be a handful of jerks thrown into the equation for good measure. This is a bit of a continuation of my last point, but what's in place to stop a jerky author from handing out a bunch of crappy ratings to make their own MS look good in comparison?

Issue number three - Will literary agents actually use this system. So far, there's no evidence that they will. Bookner admits to not having contacted any agencies at this point in the game due to the fact that they haven't had enough writers sign up. Fair enough - I can accept that. Nonetheless, literary agents are already up to their ears in submissions, so why should I be inclined to believe that, regardless of whether these works have been pre-graded, they'd go searching for another place to find manuscripts?

I imagine I'll sign up, just to see what it's all about, even though I don't have a manuscript ready. In fact, I think I'll pop the creator a message to see if he can resolve any of these issues. Stay tuned.