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Comment by webwielder2 | Hacker News Reader

Stick to checking out books from your library / Libby. You'll save money and might end up making discoveries you otherwise wouldn't.

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Libraries are excellent gatekeepers for content quality. Generally, library books are scrutinized and determined as "worth paying for".

Previously, publishers would do similar due diligence - someone at the house would actually read the book, if not work with authors.

Due diligence of this nature is not now particularly common. There is no cost risk with a digital book. It could be, and often is, written by those without the talent to match their ambition. If one is looking for new authors to read, it's very difficult to sort through the dreck.

Let the libraries sort through the dreck for you. Pro-tip: gift your local library a mere $100. They'll love you for it and invite you to all sorts of interesting gatherings. You might meet a good book, or even better, a good person.

If you look for a reputable publisher like McSweeney or Scholastic, does that help?

It’s true that nooks could be written by novice writers but even worse they could be entirely generated with LLMs, never even read end to end by the presumed authors. Sometimes there’s no human in the loop, just some scripts running.

In principle yes, but it is often far less than ideal. Popular books often have only 2 copies, physical or digital, so you need to wait in the queue for a while before you can get to read it. And that's only if your library carries the book, physical or digital -- there is often a long delay before you can find book in a bookstore and you can find it on the shelve. For various reasons the library might not want to purchase a book so you are on your own.

If you want to purchase a book on Amazon, then your best bet is to just only look for books sold and published by a reputable or at least known publisher. This is especially true for a lot of older books, which often have great editions in the midst of awful "print on demand" versions or new typesettings of old public domain version with awful quality and editing.

(Then, even further, you might as well just cut out Amazon as the middleman if you're so inclined, or look for a local book store that has online purchases.)

"Reputable publishers" put out garbage books all the time.

Remember "Snooki"? Four books for sale on Amazon, all published by a "reputable publisher" (in fact, a division of Simon and Schuster).

Of the current top 20 best sellers list:

https://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-books-Amazon/zgbs/books/...

I'd rate at least 15 as "garbage books" on sight.

"Reputable publishers" are in business to make money. Some of them may put on airs of intellectual quality, but in fact if trash books make a buck, they will publish them. If high-quality books are unlikely to make a profit, they will not.

If a book is popular, then you don't really have a problem with it being a fake or garbage right?

The problem with amazon books is all the garbage books, but if you know you want "the wheel of time" then it's pretty easy to track that down on amazon or elsewhere.

The only problem popularity presents is if it's somewhat underground. Then you might not stumble on it. Otherwise, just perusing the library should give you a lot of books which are reputable.

> Popular books often have only 2 copies, physical or digital, so you need to wait in the queue for a while before you can get to read it.

Wait in the queue? What's fundamentally wrong with that? If something's worth reading, it's worth waiting for. Do we really have to have everything right now?

>What's fundamentally wrong with that?

Nothing of course, patience is a lost virtue and relevant to the topic of the thread, it's no accident that the only thing Amazon has gotten better at is shipping garbage faster.

In fact when it comes to the current popular thing, just go for the unpopular thing that nobody else is interested in because chances are there's something more interesting in it anyway. There's also this community on reddit of people who on principle wait a few years before they play games. Time is literally the best filter. Anything that's popular and good will still be interesting in three years.

In the former case, congratulations, you now know which book to buy that’s likely not an AI scam.

At my library you can check out sewing machines and power tools as well.

And CA libraries have access to courses on Coursera.

My local library gives access to O'Reilly Safari. You have to click around a bit more than if you had a full price account but I think it's a great resource.

Mine gives access to the Wall Street Journal. As well as some other papers. It only lasts 3 days, but clicking the link again gets another 3 days.

In doing my research on current books, I checked out a few from the library that were really good and definitely HN-worthy:

Bill and Dave (Michael Malone). The history of Hewlett-Packard.

Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes (Travis Baldree)

Hitch-22 (Christopher Hitchens). his memoir

Oh I loved Infinite Loop by Malone. Bill and Dave sounds like an insta-checkout for me.

I love Libby. But buying from Amazon isn’t that hard. Check the sample first, look at the publisher. Worst comes to worst, Amazon refunds you if you return an eBook. I don’t know if there is any time limit, but I have returned several books within the first day or two for full credit.

I saw a couple of scammy AI looking "summary of <book you actually want to read>" title in the search results of Libby recently.

Hopefully just a temporary glitch, but there's a hard problem of being a gatekeeper and saying "No, that's not a real book".

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