Editorial policy
How we make these pages
Many pages on this site are made with help from AI. This page explains what the AI does, which checks we run, and what a person does. Justin Ahinon, the founder, is responsible for every page on the site.
Book search results
When you describe a book, an AI model suggests titles that match your description. We then look up each suggestion in public book catalogs, mainly Open Library, to get the correct title, author, cover and editions.
These results are AI suggestions. They can be wrong. If you recognize the book, tap "This is it!" to confirm it. Your answer helps us find out which suggestions are correct.
Saved search pages
Some searches become public pages. We only consider a search when readers confirmed one book as the answer, and nobody reported that none of the books matched.
An AI model then writes a short title and summary from the description and the confirmed book. Each page stays a draft until Justin approves it. Justin approves or rejects every public search page before it goes live.
Most of these pages are short, so we ask search engines not to index them.
Book pages
A script collects facts about the book from Open Library, Wikipedia and Google Books. We only make a page when at least two sources are about that exact book, and Open Library lists an English edition with a valid ISBN.
An AI model writes a draft that uses only those facts. An automatic check rejects drafts that contain common AI filler phrases. A second AI model then compares every claim in the draft with the sources. If it finds one claim that the sources do not support, we discard the draft.
Drafts that pass are saved as unpublished. Justin then checks each page against its sources before publishing it.
"Books like" lists
These lists are made by AI from our book data. An AI model chooses the books for each list and writes the note that explains each choice. Titles, authors, covers and publication years come from Open Library.
Treat these lists as AI suggestions, not as personal picks.
Blog posts
Justin writes the blog posts with help from AI, and edits each post before it goes live.
Found a mistake?
Email justin@whatisthatbook.com. Tell us the page and the error. We correct confirmed errors.