[fourmajor]

I disagree that stars should be evenly distributed between 1 to 5 stars. I think it's quite possible that most books that people choose to read end up being a 3 (good with some flaws) or 4 (good but not all-time great). It's kind of like the same thing with pizza. I'd give most pizza a 3 or 4. Very few 1s and 5s to be sure. 1 doesn't have to mean bottom 20% of pizzas. It can mean "awful, couldn't finish," where very few pizzas would fall into that category. 5 doesn't need to mean "best 20% of pizzas," it can mean "telling strangers about it the next day," again where very few pizzas would fall into that category.

[LVB]

I had a debate on the Criticker site about this topic since they try hard to turn your raw ratings into a normalized span. The fact is that because of ratings sites, I'm very rarely watching 1-star movies. That's good! So the low end was dominated by a 2.5/3 type ratings, which per my scale meant "just OK," but they were mapping it to "bad," somehow inferring that my rating range is 3-5.

[kortilla]

“Normal distribution” doesn’t mean evenly distributed. Most being in the middle is a normal distribution.