Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
I'm really damned sorry about this, but I'm going to restrict my responses to the data and to the arguments, and not personally attack anyone or disclose personal data. Possibly we should take this up with the moderators and ask whether we need to disclose personal informatiopn whenver we contest the preferred position on these forums. I don't recall Babi Yuga (sp? ) being asked whether he/she was in the pocket of the publishers when he defended agency pricing.
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Kali Yuga. And you haven't been around long enough, apparently, to have read when
I asked about that very thing. There are four people on MobileRead that I believe are employed by, or astroturfing for, third parties. I'll leave you to guess who the other two are. Hint: one was defending a particular device with only limited connections to ebooks, and seems to have gone away again, and the other I keep getting into arguments with.
There's another thread about paying for reviews, and a big discussion over whether a review should be paid for, whether a paid reviewer can be objective, whether a free book, or a job at a publication which accepts advertising, is enough payment to compromise objectivity, and so on. I think the consensus has come down to disclosure: that is, a reviewer should state what outside influences (free books, payola from authors, whatever) are involved, and let readers decide which reviews they'd trust. In my belief, the same is true of publishers' representatives. I'd like to have more of them, by the way, the same way we encourage authors to post here and discuss their books. But I want to know who they are, just as I want authors to say they wrote a given book instead of (as the occasional idiot does) trying to pretend it's someone else's book they've just found and want to hype.
But there's really little need to ask. Your response to the question told us all we need to know. Not that most of us didn't figure it out a long time ago.
For the record, I am not employed by any publisher. I'm a freelance website designer. I've never even designed or built a website for anyone who sells books. <obligatory plug>If you have a book for sale and need a website, feel free to get in touch.</obligatory plug> My opinions on ebooks, on ebook readers, on DRM, and everything else I post here, are entirely the opinions of an individual, not speaking on behalf of any person or organization.
I have no problems disclosing that, as it is germane to this discussion. I doubt if anyone else here -- at least anyone else not astroturfing -- has a problem with doing so either.