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Things You Can Look for to Hel...
Things You Can Look for to Help You Determine if a Book is any Good
by Michael Mould
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Back in the days before the Internet we all had to rely on best seller
lists, book reviews in the newspaper or magazines, or word of mouth to
get a feel for the quality of a book, but now we have a few much more
powerful tools to help us.
If you are considering buying a book, look it up on Amazon.com. The
Amazon.com website has several pieces of information that will help you
determine the quality of it, including, the sales rank, the reader
reviews, the number of used copies available versus new copies, and
possibly some information posted by the author. These tools are
particularly helpful if you are considering an instructional "how to" book.
The Amazon.com sales rank will only give you an idea of how well the
book is selling on Amazon.com. The lower the number the better it is
selling on Amazon. Consider that there are over 4,000,000 books ranked
on Amazon, so any book with a sales rank under 200,000 is among the top
5% of sellers on Amazon.com. Using the Amazon.com sales rank alone is
not a good indication of the book's quality because it is strictly a
measure of sales through Amazon.com and a good rank is quite possibly
only a measure of good marketing. In the past, I have found some books
with great Amazon.com sales ranks to be quite lacking in information and
some books having poor Amazon.com sales ranks to be extremely informative.
Reader reviews are also a very good indicator of the book's quality.
They are written by people that have purchased and read the book. Quite
often the reviewers will indirectly compare the book to other competing
books, giving you an indication of how the book you are interested in
purchasing stacks up against others on the same topic. You should also
look at the detail pages of other similar books and see if there are any
reviews written by buyers common to both books, this is usually a great
way to see how others think the books compare. I have seen reviews
written by buyers praising a particular book only to find a later review
of another book where the same buyer has obviously had a change of heart
and found the later book to be substantially better. You can check to
see if a buyer has reviewed other similar books by clicking on the
hypertext, "See all of my reviews" next to any reviewer's name.
Many authors now participate in the Amazon.com Connect Program which
allows the author to post additional or follow-up information on
Amazon.com's product detail pages for the books they have written. This
will quite often provide an insight into what type of book this author
has written.
One of the not so obvious ways of seeing what readers think of a book is
to see how many used copies are for sale. While this is not a real good
indicator for books in general, it is certainly a good indicator for
instructional "how to" books as the better instructional books will be
kept by the original buyer as a reference instead of putting it up for
sale. I know that when I buy a book and finish reading it I am not
likely to put it up for sale if I think I want to reference it later,
and other buyers keep theirs too ? unless it wasn't deemed worthwhile,
then it goes up for sale to recover whatever it can bring as a used
book. If a book has been published for a few months and listed on
Amazon.com, and there are few or no used copies available, it is almost
always a keeper and a very worthwhile instructional book. If it also
has good reviews and a respectable Amazon.com sales rank, it is probably
one of the best you could find on a topic.
Michael E. Mould is the author of "Online Bookselling: A Practical Guide
with Detailed Explanations and Insightful Tips," [Paperback ISBN
1427600708, CD-ROM ISBN 1599714876] and developer of "Bookkeeping for
Booksellers," [CD ISBN 1427600694] a 19 sheet linked and tabbed Excel
Workbook designed to assist online booksellers with the calculation of
their in-state retail sales tax obligations and the preparation of their
Schedule C tax forms. "Bookkeeping for Booksellers" also provides 55
integrated graphs to visually show an online bookseller just how their
business is performing.
If you would like to learn more about online bookselling, please visit:
http://www.online-bookselling.com
or send Mike an email at:
mike@online-bookselling.com
Concept Marketing Group, Inc.