When he said ST “will never profit from a review his section runs,” I right away thought the same thing you said (I bolded the most important bit): “Are not these advertisements, which sustain the publication and pay the salaries of the people who author the review…”

Unless every single bit of income to a publication/business and exactly where that income has gone has all been specifically accounted for, it has all effectively gone into a “pool” of money that probably got spread over all–or at least some of–the employees, either directly or indirectly or both; even the installation of a new water cooler partially paid for from ad revenue could be a sort of “profit” to an employee using the cooler. At least from where I’m sitting all that stuff seems true in general. Maybe a specific publication’s accountants can explain otherwise.

But if people aren’t those specific accountants, how can they know for sure who’s getting paid what for what? I don’t think absolute-sounding assumptions should be made there.

I’d like to add that if you read a particular blogger for any length of time, youshould have a pretty good idea if he’s hucking crappy books or if he’s authentic. I’d wager that if the former, that blogger is likely to have a very small audience, authenticity being pretty important in this medium. In other words–the more you sell, the smaller your audience, the less chance you’ll see any income off that selling.

Also, I think Freeman and Skoot need to get a better grip on the facts. Freeman’s post makes it sound like this whole Amazon affiliates program is some big secret (obviously not true). And in the comments thread, Skoot makes is clear that she believed bloggers earned money for every click-through–wrong again.

I don’t mind a discussion of this entire thing, and from that perspective I thank CM for bringing it up. But I think any sane discussion of this has to acknowledge the fact that there’s plenty of things to influence a traditional print book reviewer, something CM seems unable to admit.