Pay-Per-Review - Debbie Bennett
Blogging early this month, if you're wondering why it's me today... The New York Times recently ran an article online about the morality of paying for a book review. It's generated quite a bit of interest in the online writing communities and in the comments following the article. In fact I'm surprised our own Guardian online hasn't jumped on the bandwagon as it generally has a lot to say about ebook publishing. In a nutshell, the article concerns a man who made a lot of money matching up authors who wanted "favourable" online reviews for their books with people who were happy to write such reviews - for a fee. Note that I make no mention of books actually being read here - in many cases that seems to be an irrelevant and completely unnecessary part of writing a book review. Most of the online debate seems to concentrate on the author of the book paying for a review. But nobody has really discussed the other side of the coin - whether it's ri...