It used to be you could easily sort out the junk by automatically avoiding all the books that *only* had a Kindle version and no print version, as a lot of the garbage self-published stuff is stuff no real publisher would touch.

But, since you can self-publish on Amazon now where they'll print it on demand (which is kind of cool), many of these garbage books have print options.

I generally avoid any book that is "Independently published". That's a huge red flag when it comes to these kinds of books. Of course, not every book is going to be garbage, and you can always view the preview to get an idea. For example, I looked at one of those water books and it just seemed like a bunch of online blog posts that they combined together to make a book.

A low number of pages and a large font is also a red flag - just like the student in college who makes the font on his paper a little bigger to make to make it take up more pages and look bigger... so to were they just trying to make the book look bigger.

Does the book actually have editorial reviews? *REAL* editorial reviews?

Contrast the garbage ones here https://www.amazon.com/Preppers-Water-Survival-Bible-Worst-Case-ebook/dp/B0B88QZY1V/

And a "real" book here https://www.amazon.com/dp/1632172895/r

The first one has "editorial reviews" provided by the author. Just random names for all you know. Most of them seem fake/forced.

The second one has editorial reviews from actual verifiable sources.

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In the case of the two books you posted on water, seeing the same reviewers posting content (and many in the top 500 reviewers on Amazon)... they probably get paid for doing that. Companies will actually pay them to buy the product and leave a review. They buy the product so that the review shows as verified, and then once they've posted the review, they might get $5 or $10 for doing so. Authors can actually pay companies who will then pay people to buy a book (or other product) and leave a rating and a review. Sometimes they don't even want a review, just a 5 star rating.

You can click on some of the profiles and see that on the day they wrote that review, they also wrote a dozen or more other reviews, all usually 4-5 stars (the author doesn't want everyone to give them 5 stars, it's too "obvious"), and the books might cover a variety of topics. The actual text of the reviews is so basic that anyone could have written that without actually having read the book.