Money

Affiliate Disclosure

Some links on this site earn money. Here is exactly which ones, what that is worth, and the rule that stops it deciding what gets recommended.

The required statement

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Which links

Any link that goes to a retailer is an affiliate link. On this site they all point at Amazon, and they cover four things: books, audiobooks, Audible memberships and free trials, and occasionally Prime or Kindle Unlimited where a title is included with one.

They are easy to spot on purpose. Every one of them sits inside a block headed Where to get it, with this disclosure repeated above the links rather than below them, so it is read before anything is clicked rather than after. Links are never scattered through the prose, and a sentence in the middle of a review will not quietly turn out to be a paid link. They also carry the sponsored nofollow markup search engines use to identify paid links, and they travel through a /go/ address on this site before reaching the retailer, which is how a broken link gets fixed in one place instead of forty.

Buying through one costs you nothing extra. The price is the retailer’s price whether you arrive through this site or type the address yourself.

The part most sites leave out

Not all of these are worth the same. An Audible membership or a free trial pays substantially more than selling a copy of a book does, and it is not close. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the obvious reason to distrust a site like this one, and pretending the incentive does not exist would be a poor way to answer it.

So, here is the rule. What earns most has no bearing on what gets recommended. Where a book is genuinely better in print, the review says read it, and that is the recommendation that earns the least. The whole premise here is telling you whether something is worth your hours, and a site that steered you toward the format that paid better would have nothing left to sell you.

The practical test is on the site already: reviews that conclude the audiobook is the wrong choice, and a verdict of verify this edition first, which sends people away to check something rather than to buy.

What has not been paid for

No publisher, author, narrator or retailer has paid for a review here, been given a preview of one, or had any say over a score. Nobody has approval over what is published. If that ever changes for a particular title, it will be disclosed on that title’s own page, in the body, not added quietly to this one.

Scores are one person’s judgement and are labelled as such. There are no aggregate ratings on this site and no averaging of other people’s opinions.

Prices, availability and getting it wrong

Prices are not quoted here, because they change constantly and a stale price is worse than none. Whether a title is included with a membership varies by country, by account, and by the week. Check the retailer before you commit, and treat anything said here about availability as true at the time of writing rather than now.

Editions get confused, links rot, and identifiers get reused. If a link sends you to the wrong recording or a dead page, say so and it gets fixed.

The privacy policy covers what happens to your data, including the fact that following an affiliate link hands you over to the retailer and their cookies, which is their relationship with you rather than this site’s.