Quote:
Originally Posted by Tdol  Google:
Results 1 - 10 of about 19,100 for "book reads well"
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,060 for "text reads well"
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,100 for "story reads well"
Results 1 - 10 of about 301 for "play reads well"
Results 1 - 10 of about 121 for "script reads well"
Results 1 - 10 of about 9,570 for "book read well"
This suggests that the usage is fairly widespread. Also, if you try some of the searches, you will see that many of them are from Amazon reviews, so many people feel that the usage is appropriate for such contexts. |
Links trading is a futile excercise, but to put a perspective on it I get 1,190, 000 hits if I Google my own name, which would suggest that the world talks about me more than it talks about "the book reads well"...
To be more specific, counting Google hits is as a measure of use is about as unscientific as you can get. Many links are multiple references to the same phrase - something that is fairly obvious if you use Google Preview.
How many documents are there on the web? 19, 100 of them mentioning "the book reads well" is a very small percentage. Compare this with
"a good book" 456,000,000 hits
"a good book to read" 330,000,000 hits
"a well written book" 102,000,000 hits
These phrases are obviously far, far more common than 'the book reads well', not just slightly more common but by several orders of magnitude - to be precise "a good book" is used 24,000 times more often than 'the book reads well"! Such a huge difference cancels fudging by multiple references, and shows that it is a little used colloquialism. Wikipedia supports this view, describing mediopassive as:-
"... hardly ever used in English with the active voice or passive."