"As of December 1st, bloggers are going to be required to state in the review that you have been compensated. This means that if you keep the review copy, you must disclose it or risk quite the fine. You are going to have to include this on your taxes, too. Fun stuff, right? So, we are going to have change the way that we run our blogs. You also can't link to Amazon or anywhere that you can buy books. Not even author's websites."
W. T. F.
What is going on here? I'd love to know. Sarah's calling the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) on Monday, and she's taking note of any questions you may want her to ask any FTC representative that talks to her. Follow the link above to go to her site.
According to this Interview with FTC's Richard Cleland, every time a Book Blogger reviews a book, giving it a "positive" review, he or she will have to return the product (in this case, the book given for review) to the person from whom he or she got it from. If the Blogger was to keep the (book), it'd be considered a "compensation", and the Blogger would be fined (once the law was settled).
From the way Cleland puts it, the FTC is convinced that we Bloggers are only after personal benefits, such as keeping the book we're given, after we've reviewed it. Like we only care about having our houses filled with books just because we like it that way. Not because we are truly interested in discovering new and exciting worlds through reading, oh no! What am I thinking? Or course that's not what we do.
“If a blogger received enough books,” said Cleland, “he could open up a used bookstore.”
This man obviosly has no clue of what the Book Blogging Community means to the Bloggers and Authors. I think that if I had enough books, the last thing I'd do would be opening a book store.
Because if I really liked a book, I'd lend it to my friends and family, and urge people to go and buy that book!
Do Authors really think we'd re-sell the books we've been trusted with? That would be a very mean thing to do to an Author. Even if we didn't like a book, we wouldn't sell it, we'd give it to someone who'd enjoy it more than we did.
“If there’s an expectation that you’re going to write a positive review,” said Cleland, “then there should be a disclosure.”
Not always Bloggers write positive reviews, so, when there's a "negative" one, we're free to do as we please?
"Cleland informed me that the FTC’s main criteria is the degree of relationship between the advertiser and the blogger.
“The primary situation is where there’s a link to the sponsoring seller and the blogger,” said Cleland. And if a blogger repeatedly reviewed similar products (say, books or smartphones), then the FTC would raise an eyebrow if the blogger either held onto the product or there was any link to an advertisement."
This really blows me away. What relationship are they thinking we have? Or what do they want us to do? What does linking have to do with all of this?
What are they looking for to accomplish with this law?
I'll be looking forward to reading the blog post from Sarah once she gets to talk to the FTC.
What's yout opinion about all of this?
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