Dear Mr. Morrow and Publishers Thinking of Doing the Following: Book bloggers read and review books for the love.  We are not paid.  At best, some of us will sell a review here or there, or we might earn a little cash from advertising.  But almost all of us do this because we love books, and we do it knowing the only form of compensation is the thrill of getting a new book in the mail. But this is not a job.  We are not employees on the tab or paid under the table.  Free books does not equal compensation, in part because free books is an unequal relation of value.  You give us a book, but we have to read and review it, which means the value of the book in relation to the time spent working on it averages out to less than minimum wage.  Effectively, if free books constitute compensation, then those of us who blog about books are making less than someone who works at Taco Bell. The point is:  this is not a job.  We do this for the love.  Most of us will never have jobs at magazines as reviewers.  Most of us will never get beyond sharing our love of books with people who share our interests. That’s just the way it is. In other words:  we are not your bitches. While you might think your new policies are about efficiency, what they tell the rest of us is that you do not value what we do.  As @MotherReader has already pointed out:  “Can you imagine them sending this to Horn Book or the NY Times?”  Exactly.  The language of the letter is a double bitch slap to the face:  first, you tell us that what we do is a job, despite the fact that we are not paid for it, and then you treat us as less worthy of the kind of attention afforded to a place whose job it is to review books. Don’t get me wrong.  I completely understand why publishers want to streamline the process, and I sympathize with it.  But turning book blogging into a “play by the rules” game is far from streamlining anything. Instead of treating us like review slaves, you might consider asking book bloggers for their opinions.  Surveys are a wonderful thing, and book bloggers are usually quite happy to offer their thoughts on a range of topics related to — you guessed it — books. Just don’t treat us like we’re your bitches.  Because we’re not.  We’re lovers of books who enjoy sharing our love with others.  Slapping us in the face with these kinds of policies, written with such words, is not a great way to keep us interested in talking about your books. As Larry of OF Blog says:  “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” Signed, A Book Blogger ——————————————————– Thoughts from others:  Larry at OF Blog; LA Times Blogs.

A long, long time ago (in a galaxy far away), I bought a B&N Nook.  Why?  Because I liked: the design (the first Nooks were beautiful) the touchscreen at the bottom, which makes navigating the device easy and searching for books more interesting than other eReaders (it lets you browse by the covers) having a physical bookstore to go to, since I still buy hard copies the various in-store bonuses (reading anything in the store for free, free food, etc.) freedom from Amazon (I’m not a fan of Amazon’s attempt to strangle publishers, just as I am not a fan of publishers strangling writers) freedom from a single store (the ePub format lets me buy books from all over the place; that doesn’t mean I go elsewhere to get them — just that I can) Most of these things are still true.  I love my Nook and the freedom it grants me, and I still love going to an actual B&N store.  And I also love reading on the Nook.  It’s a wonderful device and the reading options are fantastic (adjusting font, etc.). So what have I got to bitch about?  A few things, really: Weak Browsing First, B&N’s bookstore is annoyingly limited on the Nook.  When you want to look for books in a specific genre, the best you can do is go to a specific subgenre (Ebooks –> Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror –> Fantasy Fiction).  From there, you cannot adjust the search so it will show new releases, bestsellers, reader review averages, etc.  These subgenres might be also useful if every publisher and self-publisher didn’t mark their books with every single subgenre reasonably applicable to the book.  But they do, which means the same books show up everywhere. Likewise, you cannot search by publisher, adjust the ebook cost (i.e., looking for science fiction books on sale), and just about anything else you’d expect to do in a bookstore.  Granted, you can do most of these things on the B&N website, but I can’t use the website when I’m out and about and in the mood for a new book. One of the other annoying things, which is as true of other devices as the Nook, is the complete inability to filter out all the self-published garbage being thrust into the ebook market.  Don’t get me wrong:  some of the SPed books are probably really good.  And I may even read some of them.  But ebook stores are flooded with $2.99 and $0.99 books, which makes it difficult to find anything when you also don’t have the ability to filter books out (such as looking only at an average of customer reviews).  What you end up with in the store are ten pages mixed with cheap SPed books and all the major titles in a particular genre. I should note that I’m not a typical book browser.  Most readers probably won’t be bothered by the Nook browser.  It’s simple, intuitive, and clear.  Likewise, it makes it easy for you to see the bestsellers in general, which many readers use to find books anyway (New York Times Bestseller, B&N’s list, etc.).  But for those of us who do want a better browsing experience, we’re S.O.L.  B&N can fix most of these things with a software update. Infrequent Advertisement of Deals My Twitter feed is flooded with Kindle deals.  Every day, it seems like dozens of traditionally published SF/F books are being temporarily marked down to $2.99 (which I assume are being advertised by Amazon).  The best the Nook has to offer is a section called “Steals ‘n’ Deals.”  The problem?  The section is limited to roughly 10 pages of books from a variety of genres.  You cannot browse for the deals specific to fantasy.  Lovely. But the deals they have are also not the same as deals elsewhere.  Right now, the first page of “Steals ‘n’ Deals” has 4 books priced at $2.99 or less.  The other 6?  $3.99 – $4.98.  Those are nice deals, I suppose, but where are all the $2.99 sales?  I don’t know.  Maybe they exist, but since the browser is limited, they’re impossible to find. Half of this could be solved by a software update, and half of it could be solved by offering customers more sales options.  Which leads me to: Coupons:  Not for Nook Products If you subscribe to B&N’s email list, you’ll occasionally receive coupons and other deals.  But every single one of these sales are not available for Nook users.  You cannot take 30% off of an ebook.  You can’t get a buy-one-get-one.  Why?  Because B&N seems to think Nook products should be excluded. At what point does this make any sense?  The Nook is tied to the B&N store, which means that B&N must want us to buy books through them, rather than some other store.  But since the ePub format makes it easy to buy books elsewhere, there’s less incentive to buy from B&N than from a store which offers more sales and deals (and such stores exist).  If you want us to stay around, then you can’t exclude us from your deals!  Those of us who own Nooks bought them in part so we could keep buying books from B&N…but online.  Amazon understands this — perhaps because they are an online store, and so everything they do revolves around online sales. It’s Not All Bad Don’t get me wrong.  The Nook is a wonderful device.  It’s beautiful and I love using it.  But it’s not going to last forever.  Eventually, it’ll break, and I’ll have to find another device to use.  My next eReader may or may not be a B&N product.  That all depends on how much attention they put into incorporating their products into their stores.  I certainly won’t move to their competitor — Amazon — but in the next few years, there are going to be a lot of different eReaders to choose from. ———————————————————– Do you own an eReader?  If so, what complaints