I’ve been working on new parts of my website where I can share a list of all the books I read in 2024 (more here) and, going forward, a cumulative reading list updated weekly. I thought these would be live already, but I hit a hurdle (fingers crossed in the next few days). One of the things that’s taking a ton of time is creating descriptions of the books. This pain led to a few insights.

When I purchase books, I never read descriptions. I usually buy a book because it was mentioned in another book or because someone credible mentioned it. I never thought about descriptions until this project. So, I started reading the descriptions on Amazon of books I own. I was shocked. The descriptions are horrible. There’s no consistent formatting or length. Some pump up the author, which I don’t care about.

As an entrepreneur, I want to read books that teach me things that will help me solve problems or understand concepts. The descriptions of books on Amazon don’t help me with this at all. To get around the issue, I usually read reviews for clues. But reading reviews can be hit or miss.

I played around with using AI to generate book descriptions. The results weren’t bad, but they weren’t stellar either. This is without creating enhanced prompts or system instructions. If I went that route, I probably could make them better, but still I don’t think AI-generated descriptions would be stellar, from an entrepreneur’s perspective, for various reasons.

So, what’s my takeaway from all this? Descriptions of biographies and other books that entrepreneurs would be interested in suck. There’s an opportunity to create better descriptions that would help entrepreneurs find the right books at the right time.