FTC Blog Guidelines

I suppose I should say something about these new FTC blogger endorsement guidelines. The only products I ever get sent for free are books, and it’s actually a bit of a mess to keep track of which books were sent to me by whom and for what purpose. At the same time, it’s a bit hard for me to understand what the upside would be in saying positive things about books I didn’t actually like in order to receive free copies of books. Insofar as I want free copies of books, I want free copies of good books, so why not just praise the good ones? In reality, receiving large quantities of free books is a bit of a problem since most of the books aren’t very interesting and they’re inconvenient to store and surprisingly difficult to give away.

The other thing I’ve gotten over the years has been free trips to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, and Denmark so it’s probably a safe bet to assume that I’m secretly an agent of possibly nefarious Northern European intelligence services.