Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

northhex

Thank you for sharing this. I do think book prizes are a better-than-average signal but I previously volunteered with a book award. I will caution that pretty much every publisher mass-submits these books for consideration in every remotely relevant prize. It is a cost of doing business (similar to how photographers pay to enter photography competitions to try and win the "award winning photographer" title, or businesses submit dossiers with consideration fees on why they're one of Michigan's top 100 places to work). There are often so many books and so few willing qualified readers that which books get an award can either be completely arbitrary, or comically easy. For example, the NCR Book Award in your book corpus faced a big scandal when it was revealed that the judges did not read the books themselves. [1] The PROSE award is so comically large that an ordinary category finalist or win is usually overstated in prestige and value. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/may/19/literary-prize-...

TMWNN

I read at night in bed. I love how, with ebooks (first Overdrive, now Libby), when I hear about an interesting book, I can within 30 seconds search for it across multiple libraries, borrow it, and send it to my Kindle.

DangitBobby

At least one of the links on the post is still to localhost:3000 instead of the vercel page. I don't want to make a substack account to tell the author so hopefully this information finds its way over there.

adamddev1

It's sad now to see a university library where students sit among endless shelves of amazing books, sitting on laptops, almost all of them with ChatGPT open. The library has become just a place to sit and open an LLM.

Planktonne

I think my issue with this project--and so many other similar ones--is that the provenance of the code does undermine the intention. If a project purports to be about quality, then knowing that the creator abdicated some of the responsibility for creating the thing they ostensibly care about makes it harder to put faith in them as having high standards elsewhere. Perhaps I am just old-fashioned, and vibe-coding is something that can be done with full focus and care for high quality, but I remain unconvinced. This is a project that needs to be cared about sincerely to be trustable/meaningful/useful, and the approach taken casts doubt on that.

zahirbmirza

Fascinated that the author shares an experience of discovery in libraries. The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer. Libraries are certainly declining in their traditional form. I find it odd that everyone has a digital resources in their pocket yet libraries are squeezing out physical books to make way for more and more computers. Try to find paper copy of the Sony founder's book.... that will be £50 on amazon. Prohibitive. No library within a 10 mile radius has a copy. I remember joyfully discovering Tony Royce's book in my library a few years ago. That enlightenment will never happen now. Primary knowledge is being lost, churned crude will forever lubricate the delusions of those who have no facility to collate the basis of our understanding.

DubiousPusher

My bona-fides here amount to little more than being a big time reader of non-fiction. But IMO, there's a nice synthesis here. Rather than going long rounds of asking LLMs about a subject, I usually end up asking it for book recommendations. It's much better than a google search and you can push it into some deep corners if you go past the surface level recs. You can get quite specific. You can find texts you wouldn't discover unless you spent years studying the topic. Often these are completely approachable and give interesting perspectives they just get buried behind a wall of syllabi and listicles. This is how I ended up reading Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' and Graves' 'Goodbye to all That' among others.

jeffreyrogers

I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since I have to stop and think about what I'm reading. I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts. When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well. Not sure why this is and its somewhat counterintuitive since I don't think I'd have the same experience with a human tutor.

adamtaylor_13

On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose. We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose. Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.

paxys

Very neat site and write-up, but I found this part amusing: > There is really nothing “AI” about this aside from the tool that collected the data and coded it, and, crucially, semantic search […] So really, everything about it is AI. And that’s not a bad thing! It’s okay to simultaneously preach the superiority of award winning books over AI-generated garbage while also acknowledging the same AI as a valuable tool for other uses.

replatformradar

Is it even possible to find one these days? I would love to see some real honest amazon kindle stats on the amount of ebooks added over the last 3 years. Even a honest pie chart to show people its not worth it to get them to stop posting them.

wackget

> Decries AI for producing slop > Uses AI to produce website

OgsyedIE

Suggested additions: the Axiom Business Book Awards, Library Journal Best Books of the Year and Booklist Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. There's also a few popular substacks that have big sideshows in regular book reviews, but I wouldn't even recommend my favourite for a public aggregator like this.

maxdo

I participate book club for several years with friends, we casually navigate certain topics, and i can tell you human slop in literature is a real thing. - almost every book try to stretch core idea into book size format - unique ideas are rare people attack them under different angels - a later phenomena : their believes almost predict entire book, outcomes etc, brainwash impact is real so not sure, how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea, with the book, you have to spend 10-40 hours to digest average, absolutely non fresh ideas, that author brought in just to sell that book, otherwise it would be magazine article worth.

diego_sandoval

The title is tautological. Quality is the opposite of slop, AI or not.

titanomachy

Thank you for this. I sorted the "technology" and "science" sections and saw a few excellent books that I've read and a few that I would really like to read. This motivates me to start setting aside "reading time" again every day, since I've lost that habit. The recent "society & culture" books gave me some good book club ideas. Bug report: filtering by "award" appears to be broken for some awards. If I select Pulitzer or National Book Award, no books show up, but I can find books with these awards by browsing.

why_at

This is pretty nice, I might use this if I'm looking to learn more on a topic. I'm always cautious when reading nonfiction because it's hard for me to tell if the author knows what they're talking about when I'm not an expert myself. Using awards is a good metric. Maybe. I am curious what the "score" for each book means. Is it calculated by giving each award a certain weight and adding them up?

zem

possibly a bug - I searched for "writers like lewis thomas" and the top two results were by thomas himself.

anvuong

Is it only me or the titles of top books from History, Nature, and Politics sound very click-baiting? I'm really taken off by these titles.