Well, I have a physical library, yes, real books, and now it’s close to 4,000 titles. It’s amazing how much shelf space it takes up, and I have books all over the house. It’s starting to look like a museum, because it seems like no one buys books anymore, well yeah, but they’re e-books on their e-readers. Just about the worst thing I can think of is to read a book from cover to cover, especially a non-fiction book, and find myself so disappointed after I’ve finished it.

Maybe like you, my time is valuable, and maybe this is the reason why, as an author of online articles, I would like to recommend you to prepare book reviews of the books you have read. Putting them online for everyone to read could save someone a lot of time and help recommend the best books, helping the best authors get the word out. Still, if you’re going to write book reviews, do so honestly and with integrity, we don’t need any more shouting promoting the wrong things.

There was a rather disturbing article, at least in my opinion, recently in the New York Times on August 26, 2012 titled; “The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy” by David Streitfeld, which told of a gentleman who ran a business doing book reviews for authors and publishers for a fee. This is a real problem if the person does not clearly state in the article that he was paid for the review, otherwise he is violating the “loud marketing” rules according to the FTC.

Trust me when I say this is the wrong way to play, instead you should do it right and if you do get paid remember we will need full disclosure. That is, if you were paid or given a book for free to read under the auspices of doing a positive review on the title, then you should tell the individual reader about that online book review. It can be a simple note or a couple of sentences about how excited you were to receive the author’s free book to review the book.

This way, the reader knows that there might be some unintentional positive bias in your article. Maybe there isn’t, and I certainly hope there isn’t, but if there is, you have revealed to the reader the truth and reality of the situation. That’s fair, do you agree? If you are going to prepare and write online articles that are book reviews, I hope you will consider this and do it well.