Quote:
Originally Posted by koland
I did see a comment in the other thread, that it's as easy as clicking forward on an email to put together these posts -- I wish!
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Eh, I was just going by personal experience which says that it tends to take roughly 2 minutes per title max for me to post a new thread for a newly found freebie, including checking MR to see if it's been previously posted and all 4 major stores to see if it's available there*, and then copy-pasting the title, author, and description into a template I keep in Stickies and editing for the relevant store links. A couple minutes more if I add commentary on top of that.
I don't think that copy-pasting an additional ?tag=heymaybeiget4centsonthedollarifimlucky-20† to the end of every Amazon clicky link would have taken more than another dozen seconds on top of the regular workflow, if that. Of course, if you have to run things through some special linkifier to get an affiliate URL and you do a bunch of titles in a row, it'll add up and eat into your free time.
And the limiting reagent in the bargain books equation has always been the worthiness of the selection, and I appreciate that many posters take the time to look for genuine discounted-from-a-much-higher-full-price titles which readers will actually be interested in.
But for just putting a buy-link for a pre-selected low-cost e-book in a new post, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to consider it to take roughly the same few minutes that it would for me to copy-paste a message to all my "friends", informing them that due to recent election upheaval and changes in the way that the income trust fund upon which my agèd grandparents rely will be taxed by our untrustworthy new government, I am hereby requesting that my generous neighbours to the south please consider helping my respected elders preserve the support of their old age by assisting them to create off-shore tax shelter accounts from which the commonwealthy sum of 1 MILLION CANADIAN DOLLARS which represents part of the interest on the percentage saved will be transferred into their own accounts‡ as a signal token of the gratitude of my agèd grandparents for helping my respected elders to preserve the support of their old age.
* Multiple browser tabs are my friend.
† Not an actual affiliate tag. Though if I were to go that route and start posting links with them, that would probably be it, just so we have full disclosure of financial interest.
‡ For all of maybe 48 hours before the EFT hold clears and my agèd grandparents clean out your own account like a Roomba on a rampage, that is.