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Back to the subject of the validity of reviews for (e)books received at no charge...
I've reviewed several ebooks that I got for free. In some cases, I got them at no cost from the author - and some of those were beta-reading gigs. Certainly it strikes me as unethical not to disclose that kind of relationship with the author; there is a certain instinctive pressure not to say bad things about someone who's done me the favor of giving me free reading material. In the rare cases where my review of those copies would be negative, I've usually solved the conundrum by emailing the author with the offer to either post the review or not - but in no case would I dishonestly review the book. However, in the case of free-or-discounted public availability, I got it like any other member of the public and am under no obligation to spare your feelings.
What I try to do with all of my reviews is rate a book on three factors: story content, structural and grammatical content, and standard ebook price. In other words: was it interesting, did it need editing, and is it worth the price? (Hmm. Put that way, it sounds like I'm judging Cutthroat Kitchen.) I generally start out with the story rating, dock points if it needed edits, and adjust that result for pricing. I usually try to say something nice about the book, because there was some factor that caught my eye and made me read it. Unfortunately, sometimes the best I can do is along the lines of "I really wanted to like this."
For instance, suppose I get a story that's 90 pages long, normally $6.99, but it's on sale for free or 99 cents. I can tell you right away that there's no way I'm giving it five stars; the normal price is too high for that little content. I start reading, and the story's good - better than average, no obvious continuity flaws, but not stellar - but the grammar's awful. Not just "a few misplaced commas" bad, but "a monarch does not rain over a kingdom, and the punctuation makes my eyes bleed" bad. I hate giving out one-star ratings, but I'd be hard-pressed not to do so in that case: four stars for the story, minus two for horrible craft, minus one for the price. I might be generous and give it two stars if I particularly liked the story, but I'd justify it as rounding a 1.5 up. (Just as I feel five-stars should be reserved for truly excellent work, I save one-stars for hideously awful crap.) And I'd spell out that breakdown.
The way I see it, if I'm using that sort of standard for my own reviews, the source shouldn't matter too much. If anything, a "free for review" bias is likely to show up in the editing scale, where I might give the author a heads-up and a chance to fix the problems. That happened a while back, where I started reading a FFR book and contacted the author after a couple of chapters. I'd found several severe mechanical problems that would necessitate a bad review, including a spoilerific preface and a double flashback, and I honored the request that I not proceed further. I still hope the author does a rewrite; the story looked like it had potential.
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