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dadioflex;
Think of the Billboard 100 and its use in the marketplace to track what the most popular music sales are. This situation is as if a studio released, say, a new Alicia Keys album and gave away millions of copies for free and then was shown on the Billboard 100 as the top selling album at the moment.
You could give away the worse book of the century but have it listed in the Top Ten sellers on Amazon just because people grabbed it since it was free. People not knowing any better in the future could look at that title or author and have an false sense of the merit of the author in the bookreading community based on those rankings.
It is perfectly within their right to give away a book and use it as a loss leader but having it appear in the ranking system is fishy at best.
We recently had a user that argued, quite ardently in fact, for systems like Amazons in that they were nearly impossible to 'game'. I think this shows just how any system can be.
-MJ
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