A couple of suggestions

[anomalocaris]

Just suggestions(not complaints!) based on my last 2 review experiences.

The review I wrote today was for a picture book. I'm pretty sure that my review was required to have more words than the actual book did. Maybe there should be a separate policy for that sort of thing. Like a quick projects section for very short pieces where you don't necessarily get credit for a full length review, but where the review requirements are appropriate to the material.

The previous one was just the opposite. The "book" turned out to be a collected volume of four books. Perhaps assignments where the reviewer is required to read more than one book should be handled a little differently, since the reviewer is being asked to handle 2-4 assignments in the same amount of time normally allotted for one, and ultimately only gets credit for one.

I don't really have a problem with the current system. In my case it balanced out -- an extra long project followed by a microproject. Just tossing it out there as "food for thought."

[Scott]

I agree with the issues.

For smaller books or picture books, I still think the minimum word requirement should be fine. Most reviews are longer than the minimum anyway. And it's quite possible to express opinion that exceeds the content of the original piece. A critique of a single drawing on a wall might garner a whole essay about it for instance. However, it could still help to have slightly different requirements or expectations for smaller books or picture books.

But especially for the issue of unusually large books this can be a problem.

The best solution I think is for me to add information about the length of the book into the database, probably simply the number of pages. At the very least, this would allow reviewers to know how long the book is before selecting it. I could also potentially use that to make modified requirements for books based on size, so that small or large books have different requirements than more average sized books.