[coldpie]

> Never regretted reading them

Interesting! I'm surprised to hear you've had that experience. I pick out books at the library largely by the cover & back blurb, not by whether they're popular or well reviewed or whatever. And to be honest, I've picked out a lot of crap this way, where I turn it back in after just a chapter or two. I suspect that frequency of being checked out & popularity/well-reviewed-ness are correlated. So I also suspect (admittedly without evidence) that my algorithm of picking somewhat randomly means I pick out books that are not popular with some frequency, and I've definitely regretted many of my choices. So it's surprising to me that you haven't had any that were terrible.

[eudamoniac]

I have around 1200 ebooks in Calibre; around 300 I downloaded on purpose and the rest came in large batches. I have these two groups separated out. I'm pretty sure I've never read one from the batch group that was close to good. The vast majority of books are crap and if you pick at random you're going to pick crap.

Most of my batch books are from Standard Ebooks which, while a noble project, has a serious addiction to publishing dreck no one should waste time reading.

[robin_reala]

SE just publishes stuff that volunteers want to work on. There’s no master plan beyond the collections policy: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy

[eudamoniac]

Well it turns out that the volunteers have bad taste I'm afraid

[coldpie]

Yeah I suspect ebooks are even more dire as they have neither the curation of a publisher putting money into physical production; or the curation of a librarian with limited shelf space.