[Elfwreck]

It's a delightful idea; I don't think it's remotely practical. Which is too bad.

Posit:
1) A "standards collective" group that has several (dozens of?) readers, who are all qualified to judge if a book is "well-written." These people are, hypothetically, capable of telling the difference between bad grammar and vernacular used for effect, and know the difference between its and it's, and will catch run-on sentences and incoherent phrasing even in genres they don't normally read; they won't confuse the stylistic choices of "purple prose" romances for grammar errors.

Not an impossible goal--this group of people--but already, this isn't looking easy.

2) This group of people is fluent enough in ebookery to know the difference between a *writing* error and a *formatting* error. Possibly, they are also trained to catch the latter.

3) A website, hosted by someone(s) with money, wherein they take admissions and read the books and evaluate them. Whether these are whole books or just a single chapter is an optional detail--the point is, they have a place where people send their works in.

4) The Collective reads books, evaluates them (presume, for the sake of discussion, that all their evaluations are spot-on accurate), and pronounces either two or three judgements:

TWO
1) This book did not meet our standards.
2) This book met our standards; it is a Well-Written Ebook.

THREE
1) This book did not meet our standards.
2) This book met our standards; it is a Well-Written Ebook.
3) This book met our standards and was a pleasure to read; it is a Recommended Well-Written Ebook.

------

Again: Assume the judgments are accurate. (Because while they probably won't all be, that's a whole *different* swarm of problems.)

5) The Collective posts its daily/weekly/monthly/whatever list of Books We've Read And How We've Labeled Them to its blog, or archive, or wiki.

5) Author or indie company gets evaluation back. If they get a "Well-Written Ebook" judgement, they slap that phrase on its ad copy, maybe put a banner on their website or a sticker-picture on the front of the ebook (ugh, that'd need to be tiny), and proceed to tell one and all that their book is awesome, and they have proof.

If they get a "did not meet our standards" response, they never mention it again, and possibly spend the next six months bad-mouthing The Collective, insisting they're a pack of illiterate bigots who don't recognize real talent when they see it. (This may also happen with the three-options variant, wherein a publisher expects a "Recommended" label and doesn't get one.)

6) Author on a rampage posts an objection to the Collective's blog post of "Books That Didn't Meet Our Standards." Author insists that Collective is using arbitrary and meaningless "standards," and demands that his excellent work of literary genius be removed from their list, and if they don't, he's going to sue for defamation and cite the difference between Konrath's latest sales and his own as the damages.

... and that's before we get to "how does the public find out what *failed* to meet the standards?" (Because they're not going to leave Amazon on their Kindles and browse to some blog somewhere to check a list before they buy.)

... and if all that worked *excellently well*, and the first attempted lawsuit was thrown out so hard that nobody will try it again for a decade, there's *still* the problem of the thousands of new ebooks every year that the Collective *doesn't* see. Because unless this is a paid group of well-trained reviewers, they're really only going to get to a handful of books. (If the *are* a paid group of well-trained reviewers, they're still not going to get to hundreds every month.)

I *loooove* the idea of a book-reviewing collective, with Official Stamps of Awesomeness, or at least of Competence, to hand out. But I can't think of any way to do it that doesn't come down to "here's our group blog, and the list of books we liked."