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, how do you justify the rank of "Huckleberry Finn" (20) vs "All Quiet on the Western Front" (82) vs "Hunger Games" (1371).

2. In the ranks of the books from only few lists, there are often 1000 books by a single rank. You could just list them without rank to have the same effect.

3. The titles 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 data 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. Other data errors (doubles, wrong authors, ...). 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 ":"

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

7. The list is very much English-centered. As their list from which they copied are mostly in English, non-English books are not represented well.

Good points of that site:

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

2. A 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.