On this page
In August 2023, 404 Media reported that mushroom-foraging guides on Amazon looked largely machine-written. An online AI detector, ZeroGPT, rated text from several of them as more than 85% or 100% AI-written, and one author's claimed university said it had no record of her. The New York Mycological Society told buyers: "Please only buy books of known authors and foragers, it can literally mean life or death."
A weak JEE or board-exam guide will not poison anyone. But it can teach you a wrong method that you then practise for months. Below are four checks you can do in about 15 minutes, before you pay.
Why are AI-written books sold in online stores?
Self-publishing is quick, and writing a book with AI is quicker. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) content guidelines require authors to tell Amazon about AI-generated content when they publish. Under those guidelines, "AI-generated" means text, images or translations created by an AI-based tool, even if the author edited them heavily afterwards.
The rule covers what authors tell Amazon; the guidelines do not say buyers will see a label on the product page.
In September 2023, KDP cut the number of new titles one user could create to three a day, "in order to help protect against abuse". The same year, the writer Jane Friedman found books she had not written being sold under her name. Amazon at first said it would not remove them. So a real name on the cover does not prove that person wrote the book.
Can an AI detector tell if a book is written by AI?
Not reliably. A team led by Debora Weber-Wulff tested 12 public detection tools and two commercial systems. They found the tools "neither accurate nor reliable", and the tools leaned towards calling text human-written.
AI help itself is not the problem. KDP's own guidelines say a book you wrote yourself and then polished with AI tools counts as "AI-assisted", not AI-generated. What matters to you is whether the physics, chemistry or maths in the book is right, and you can check that yourself. Our post on why AI-writing detectors misfire explains how these tools go wrong.
How do you check a study book before buying it?
Open the listing and the free preview ("Look inside" or sample pages), and go through these four checks.
Author. Search the author's name and the subject outside the store. A real exam-book author usually has a trace: a college, a coaching or school job, older editions, reviews from teachers. Warning signs from the 404 Media cases: a vague bio with no institution, no presence outside the store, a degree or college that cannot be confirmed, and dozens of titles published within a few months.
Publisher. Find the copyright page in the preview and look for a publisher's name and address, an ISBN, an edition and a year. Then compare the chapter list with the current syllabus on the official NTA or CBSE website. A book that skips topics added recently, or keeps topics that were dropped, was not written for your exam.
Sample pages. Read two full pages. Watch for filler openings that say nothing ("In today's fast-paced world..."), the same point said three ways, repeated headings, and missing or mislabelled diagrams.
Errors. Redo three solved examples from the preview in a topic you know well. If even one is wrong and the book does not flag it as a misprint, do not buy it.
A worked example of the error check
Say the preview has this problem: a ball is thrown at 20 m/s at 30 degrees to the ground; take g = 10 m/s². Find the range.
Range = u² sin 2θ / g = (400 × sin 60°) / 10 = 400 × 0.866 / 10, which is about 34.6 m.
If the book prints 40 m, it has used u²/g, the maximum range, which only holds for a 45-degree throw. That is a method error, not a typo.
If it prints 34.6 m but jumps from formula to answer, it will not teach you the steps.
What if you already bought a poor-quality book?
Check whether the store's return window is still open, and use the listing's report option if the book is not what it claims to be.
If you keep it, use it only as a source of practice questions, and check every answer against a trusted reference. NCERT puts its textbooks for Classes 1 to 12 online as free PDFs. Our guide on how to compare NCERT with a reference book shows how to spot where an explanation goes wrong. If the book has no answer key you trust, try these ways to check your answers without an answer key.
When a solution in the book looks wrong and you cannot see why, the Fermi Problem Library has worked problems with a step-by-step solver that explains the reasoning rather than just printing an answer, so you can find the step where the book went wrong.
Before your next guidebook purchase, open the preview and give it the 15-minute check.
