Is the Greatest Book List Worth it? Partly Yes and Mostly No.

 There is a site, The Greatest Books, which apparently merged 652 "Best Books lists" into one list of over 21000 books. To establish a ranking, they do some hokus-pokus on the calculation of the worth of the lists and finally it outputs, as an example:

"The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the 3rd greatest book of all time."

Negative points of that site:

1. The ranking 'per se' is absolutely meaningless, can you justify ranking "Huckleberry Finn" as #20, and "All Quiet on the Western Front" as #82 and "Hunger Games" as #1371.

2. When books appear only in a few lists, it leads often to 1000 books occupying a single rank. Listing them without rank would have the same effect.

3. The titles of the books are either translated or original, no consistency - which shows that they didn't work on the data. Unfortunately, they didn't provide original titles. So, even if the original language is said to be German, they randomly provide the titles in English or German. It would be nice to have double titles: original and translated (English is OK).

4. Many books have either unknown authors, or unknown publication years or unknown language which shows that they didn't work too much on the data. A day or 2 working with AI (Gemini, ChatGPT) would have solved most solvable errors. But they ask you to correct their data. The easy way.

5. Many data errors (misattributed author/titels/years, double entries, wrong authors, ...). 

6. There is also one error related to their copy process. If a title contained a ":" and they copied it, the title after copying had lost the ":" and the part after the ":"

7. Annoying advertisements. Lots of! And very slow loading of new pages.

8. The list is very much English-centered. It seems their lists from which they copied were mostly in English, non-English books are not represented well which therefore makes their ranking mechanism useless.

Good points of that site:

1. You can download the full list, it just takes you 176 copy and pastes with 120 books each.

2. A huge list of read-worthy books.

It seems that the site mainly exists to make referral money from sending you to Amazon or other online bookstores.