Is this book good?: Avoid making bad book purchases

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

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Promoted

Wanted

Cool! I'm going to try this one for my next book purchase :)

5yr ago

Is this book good?

Maker

This is a great tool if I need help choosing which book I should read next.