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.
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