Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this:

I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fictional stories are. The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works.

The history section of the book price index is incredibly america-biased. History of america, american natives, japan after ww2 and vietnam in the last century.

Not to be that guy but your site is terrible.

It does not do the most important function well, giving me a list of award winning books that is easy to sort through. It is not clear what is a link and what is not.

It looks fine though somewhat generic. But it is not actually functional in a real sense.

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.

If you are interested in a non-fiction book, check out Veritas: Truth Across Cultures[1]. It's a collection of quotes/saying/proverbs that are similar between cultures, which I call truths. I am in interested in long term thinking, things that stood the test of time. This was primarily put together for myself as a lens to view the world.

[1] https://www.chestergrant.com/veritas

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-...

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.

The article resonates, there is great serendipity in somewhat random exploration of books. But then the web app seems to be the antithesis of this? I clicked a few categories and the top ranked books all had the “popularity contest” smell, sort of the antithesis of random exploration.