Is this book good?

Is this book good?

Avoid making bad book purchases

2 followers

A chrome extension that helps you spot red flags in reviews while shopping for books on Amazon.com and lets you instantly compare books with different numbers of reviews.
Is this book good? gallery image
Is this book good? gallery image
Is this book good? gallery image
Is this book good? gallery image
Is this book good? gallery image
Launch Team

What do you think? …

Eva
Cool! I'm going to try this one for my next book purchase :)
Christian von Uffel
Hey PH, I made "Is this book good?" to solve a problem I was experiencing myself. I have a long reading list and was finding myself going through the same process over and over again to filter out or decide between which books to read. I have a hard time stopping to read books once I've gotten started so I started adopting this practice of looking to disqualify potential book purchases from among my current list of options. The ways I disqualified my book purchases were usually by looking for some available, but not so easy to spot, information on the amazon.com book's product listing page: how recently the book came out and what percentage of people gave the book a 1-star review. Typically, whenever I've been unsure about making purchases in general, I immediately go read the 1-star reviews because while they're often quite biased they're often also the most informative. I look at the book's release date for a similar reason. When a book is just released, often the only people who review it are the people who were most excited about it, so I want to wait for the dust to settle and, especially if it's non-fiction, for people to have a chance to see if the ideas and concepts in the book actually work out in real-life. The third method of disqualification I've implemented, the buyer success rate, is something I only implemented after watching this video from 3Blue1Brown on certainty in reviews and Binomial distributions:
I was already annoyed by positive bias I've seen in reviews a bunch elsewhere, mostly on movie ratings sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, and was already aware of statistical methods to account for total review numbers (mean adjusted r-squared), but this video was a great reminder of the problem and offered a solution I could easily implement. I must have performed the overall book disqualification process for myself about 20 times before I decided I should make it into a product. Once I decided to make this product, I talked to a few developers about it, because well at the time I didn't know how to build it myself. Using their feedback, I created a simple product spec and had a few friends review it, then I tried to get a few developers to work on it and was surprised to learn that the ones I reached out to weren't interested in working on it, but wouldn't come out and say that directly nor respond in a timely fashion. So being stubborn, I decided to learn how to build it myself. I taught myself some basic Javascript, RegEx, CSS, and kept tinkering and taking notes. A few months later and I built my first product; one that I actually like to use and didn't want to uninstall. I hope you like it too! Here's the extension's GitHub repo if you want to see the code for it yourself, including my notes: https://github.com/Christian-von... Best, Christian
Spencer Depas
This is a great tool if I need help choosing which book I should read next.