When it comes to reading, I'm spoiled! I notice I am getting more and more picky when it comes to ordering books from Amazon, which makes finding books that seem worth reading much harder to find.

Over the years I've read quite a pile of books particularly related to programming, general business, entrepreneurship and software engineering. Now that I am reading up on new topics such as organizational development, lean methods and statistical research methods I am having real trouble finding books I would consider reading just based on the table of contents and Amazon reviews. This is probably a good thing, since the most efficient way to get information is to only read good books.

Here are a couple of guidelines for picking good non-fiction books:

  1. Number of reviews. If there is only a small number of reviews, there is a risk that those reviews are written by the author or his/her friends. A book with more reviews is more credible, as is a book which has had more editions.
  2. Distribution of reviews. If the reviews are split between 5-star and 1-star reviews, the 5-star reviews are most likely fake. This is an absolutely disgusting practice, but unfortunately common.
  3. Credentials of the authors. If the authors are practitioners and not scientists, make sure they do not work for a consultancy. I have unfortunately 1-2 books that I did not check adequately and ended up getting a useless brochure book.
  4. The table of contents.

    1. What is the starting point of the discussion? This defines the prerequisite knowledge that you are expected to have. Reading a book which is for beginners is incredible boring, while reading an advanced book as a beginner is frustrating.Evaluate whether you have the prerequisite knowledge and could read the first few chapters without getting bored to tears. Remember that most popular business books are written for an audience that reads just a few books per year - this pretty much makes them too repetitive if you read more than that.
    2. What is the emphasis of the book? Is it oriented towards: a) practice or b) checklists, c) proper theory or d) undergraduate students textbook? (See below for more)
    3. How many pages are dedicated towards each topic? Don't expect anything good from a book that has a 200 pages and cover 200 topics: that's just one tiny page per topic.Good books don't cover everything with the same small amount of pages, because everything is not equally important in real life.
  5. The actual content of the reviews. Don't bother with 5- or 4-star reviews, they will just tell you the book is good. Read the 1-star and 3-star reviews.See if the 1-star reviews seem to be justified or are just a result of the reviewer being an idiot (e.g. "Haven't received book from Amazon" or "This book is too difficult" -reviews).3-star reviews are usually the best, since the author did like some aspects but did not like others. Pay attention to reviews that say that a book is too basic or simple. If this is said more than once, you probably don't want to read that book - American writing in particular is already very verbose and too many books are written where a five-page article would do, hence reviews which state that the book is too simple should be taken very seriously.
  6. Number of and affiliation of authors. If all the authors are from the same institution or organization, the book is probably of lower quality. A huge warning sign is a "collection" book that has multiple chapters on different topics by the same authors, all from the same decade. This indicates that the authors have not bothered to contact the people who are at the top of their respective fields; articles which are all from the same decade are likely to be just a random set of articles which were written for the book rather than the result of good editorial work.
  7. Order of topics. Scientific collection books usually order the chapters so that the better and more widely applicable material is at the front of the book, and the more specialized and less interesting material is at the end. It is safe to assume that if the chapter that seems decent for your purpose is at the end of the book, you are better off finding a more specialized book.
Four classes of books:

I would put books in four broad categories, two of which are useful and two are useless:

  1. Practical books
  2. Academic books
  3. Ego-booster books
  4. Motivational books
Practical books: experience-based vs checklist books

Practical books are in my opinion divisible into two categories: advice from practitioners and advice from people who like to write checklists. That is, you have books that are based on the experiences of a practitioner, and then you have books that are written by people who have not actually done that much but wanted to write a book and ended up writing a checklist - a list of things that might be of use without really emphasizing what is important.

Try to get a feel of the book from the preview (if you can't, don't buy it!), search for a couple of phrases that interest you. Does the author know what they are doing, or are they just collecting information from other people? Sometimes a "checklist book" is not bad - when you just need the basics and can't be bothered to collect all the information. However, usually the experience-based book is better.

Academic books: theory vs textbook

When it comes to academic books, the two main types are proper theory books and textbooks. The more I have seen and read textbooks, the less I like them. Generally speaking they try to cover everything and end up saying nothing.

If you care about the topic, don't get a textbook. Instead, get a proper collection of influential articles if it exists (ex. Oxford Handbook of X). You will perhaps not be fully prepared for everything you read, but you will learn something useful. Unlike after reading a textbook, where you just have fuzzy awareness of the fact that "all kinds of things happen" in a particular field.

Ego-booster books: academic and practical

There is also another category of books which are basically books written for the author's ego. Some books are not written to be read, they are written either to impress others or to act as marketing tools.

The academic substitute for having a nice car sometimes seems to be writing an obtuse treatise which is downright hostile towards the reader, while consultancies in particular are guilty of writing books in which the answer to every question is "hire our consultancy". The academic ego book is harder to spot, so pay attention when previewing the book.

Motivational books: feeling good doesn't make it so

Finally, there is a category of fiction books which pretend to be non-fiction books. The motivational books may be a fun read at times, and are usually the most popular books in their category.

However, they are fiction for your entertainment. Feeling good is nice, but that does not change the fact that there are people who are knowledgeable, talented and well-connected doing whatever the book is about, and that feeling good does not make you knowledgeable, talented or well-connected.