Methodology

Compass Book Ratings provides content analysis for the following areas:

  • Profanity/Language
  • Violence/Gore
  • Sex/Nudity

These three areas are rated on a scale of  0 to 10+.  A rating of 0 would indicate no content present.  10+ would represent frequent and/or explicit content.  As the + indicates, there is no upper limit on the amount of content.

Books with the same numerical rating in a category do not indicate identical content–just similar content in terms of either quantity and/or degree.
The recommended age is an important part of the content analysis. Be sure to look at it.

Effort has been made to standardize the review process, but it is still an approximation so please view the scores as an estimation.  We will do the best we can!

To  understand the terms used in the profanity/language category go to our Language Lexicon

Content reviews also note:

  • Mature themes
  • Drug/alcohol use

Beginning February 1, 2012 a formalized content review process was instituted to provide more consistent results and to allow site users to tailor their book searches to more closely match their needs.  Also, layout of the website was re-designed to allow for improved querying capabilities and posting reviews.

In addition, Compass Book Ratings provides an overall, starred, literary review that is independent of the content review.  There is content and there is great writing and the two are not necessarily correlated!

Please note that reviews dated prior to February 1, 2012 came from SqueakyCleanReads.com and had a more informal content review process. Those reviews have been added to our database because they have a lot of great content information, but their format will look different and there may be wider variation in those reviews.