But if you gave out positive reviews and were paid to do so then that is when peoples natural cynicsm will undercut your review. People who trust you now might start to lose their trust in you for something that just seems like a payoff.

You seem like a standup guy and I understand your logic here. Reading books takes time and ‘lazy’ is right there in the title so why shouldn’t people pay you? And I don’t think you’d intentionally try to set yourself up in business as a shill. But as far as that stuff goes its probably best to avoid even the appearance of being paid off for endorsements.

In general though I really don’t think such a system would work for the world in general. There are just too many people with ethics problems out there who would say anything for an easy buck.

As for books especially, I’m totally with you – I’ve pretty much stopped accepting books for review because it’s just not a good use of my time.

I need a little mental downtime when I’m commuting (when I would listen to audio books). That time helps me process the ideas that turn into articles here. If I’m focusing on an audio book, I’m not sure where that processing time is going to come from.

Thanks Evan, even if I was paid well, I don’t think I’d do more than 5 to 7 a year as I just don’t normally have time to read books.

Knowing your blog, I wouldn’t discount a good recommendation even if you were getting paid, but I can see how that would get confusing if it was done all the time.

Thanks for letting me know about getting paid to do this. I have no qualms mentioning what I dislike about a book review, and I’ll tell each person who contacts me so.

Ahh, I’m learning so much. What an interesting world!

Have you considered limiting yourself to books that have an audio version? You probably listen faster than you read.

As for getting paid to review (regardless of whether it’s thumbs up or down) this reminds me slightly of the Payola scandal. The author pays you and gets “spins” (or in this case, gets mentioned on your blog).

It almost seems like there would be a niche for a blog devoted to reviewing PF books (or maybe there already is).

I see what you are saying here. However, I’m pretty good at being quite a jackass as my regular readers know. If you say something stupid, I’m going to call you on it, whether you are paying me or not.

I was being being paid to blog for Prosper (on their official blog, not here) and I wrote a post here about buying my endorsement there, because I thought it was stupid that Prosper was touting that loans with endorsements do so much better.

I’m leaning towards you being right that in general such a system wouldn’t work as you say. I may just be feeling optimistic that I’ve earned enough trust where it could work.

I think I’d just rather be doing something else than reading and writing reviews, especially since I don’t really get much traffic on those posts.

I think the company did offer to do a book giveaway. However, I’ve had problems with giveaways in the past.

One time I had to chase a company for six months to make good on their offer and send out the goods after the winners complained that they never got their items.

So I learned to ask for the goods upfront, but then it became even more work for me to literally mail them out (getting to a post office during postal hours can be rough for me). By the time I was through, I wished that I had just emailed Amazon gift certificates out (from my own pocket) and told readers to buy that book or anything else they want.

I don’t want to sound overly “Lazy”, but after 10 hours of reading a book and writing a post, the last thing my wife wants to hear is that I have to package and mail out some copies to people (not to mention that it requires me getting a P.O. Box to keep anonymity, which requires me to present a copy of my rental agreement to the post office… it’s like every option has 4 or 5 dependencies on it.)

[Wow I'm in a particularly whiny mode today. Sorry all.]

Its like trusting representatives of Monavie for an unbiased opinion of Monavie.

So I rank it an 8.

Maybe that’s my thoughts on Four Hour Work Week. I think that’s a perfect fit for my readers. (I’m trying to get through it, but I’ve been busy lately. I paid my own cash for the book, I wasn’t asked to review it and given a free book, so I don’t count it as the same.)

I get a lot of books like Last Chance Millionaire, that are mildly interesting to me and probably of interest to the general audience. I could probably spend the next 12 months reading about 30-35 books (I’m a really slow reader), so I’d have 30-35 posts to spread throughout a year.

I can see why “Credit Card Secrets Revealed” would come across as perhaps over the top marketing, but the Last Chance Millionaire isn’t that… it’s just that even some good quality books don’t work for me because they don’t scale with my time.