Even if a reviewer gets a book and feels bland and vaguely indifferent towards it, I’ll probably be like, ‘how about you review a nice book from me that you thought was awesome instead of forcing yourself to write something vague and indifferent about this book - I’ll find someone else who loves it to cover it.’ Reviewers to whom I send books are not obligated to write reviews! In fact, if they get books from me in the mail and they hate them, I would probably prefer that they didn’t write any review at all. To none of them do I send anything resembling the directive, ‘by receiving this book in the mail, you have agreed to write a review.’

Some of them are to people who request books some of them are to people I think would like the books. However! I do want to be clear about my review-copies-sending-out policy, because it doesn’t exactly fall into line with this statement. Please, book websites - try not to get sued as much as is legally necessary to protect yourselves! If you did get sued, we would be sad for you.

And I’m totally fine with the not-getting-sued disclaimer. Presumably it’s there to get the legal rigamarole out of the way and not cause embittered influenced book-buyers to rise up and sue a site because they didn’t realize that publishers sometimes give reviewers books for free. This is a statement that I’ve been seeing pop up on the bottom of a number of review sites recently. ‘This review copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.’ Sorry, bloggers! You only exist in the near-present past.) ( This photo is from the Smithsonian Institute and was taken in 1918 as it is from the past, these were probably not blogger review copies.

Copy me that review