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“But I must say, the idea of authors paying for reviews—from reviewers who are sometimes themselves paid—and then having them “posted” on dozens of sites, under what must be bogus names… well, it creeps me out.” What do you think about paid reviews being posted on free sites like Amazon or LibraryThing? Creepy and untrustworthy, or just another part of the business?
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“DRM is Digital Rights Management, or, more appropriately, Driving Readers Mad. The security wrapped around ebooks that allegedly prevents me from sharing them really just prevents me from owning the actual book itself. Given the various types of formats and the varying degrees of security embedded within them, DRM means I’m being sold a format and not the actual book. Moreover, when something goes wrong, and with computers, something always does, the honest consumer is the one who gets screwed.” The Bitches break it down for those that may still not know what DRM is and how it affects them.
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“It turns out we weren’t the only ones interested in being able to read books on handheld devices in advance of publication, and though it was acknowledged that NetGalley did have quite a few publishers already participating in its system, the PDFs they distribute are encrypted, so we wouldn’t be able to convert them into a Kindle-friendly format—and then there were the other e-book readers to consider, of course. (Who, we wondered, has the patience or endurance to read an entire book sitting at their desk?) Some publishers could offer exactly the sort of files we were looking for, but a more… ubiquitious approach to the situation would be helpful.” Wanna get in on the conversation? If you have a Twitter account you can use the hashtag #digiarcs, which’ll connect all the digital ARCs convos together, or you can also comment on this post at GalleyCat.
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March 13, 2009 at 9:21 PM
Alyce
Great links! I do think there’s a big difference between being a paid reviewer for something like a paper where the paper is paying you, not the author. When the money is coming from an independent source the reviewer wouldn’t feel an obligation to give a good review. Being paid by an author would seem like a contract between the reviewer and the author to give a good review. To me that seems like the author is cheating. Because if they are paying for an advertisement (which is basically what it would be) then it should be marked as an advertisement, not a review.