In the comments one of the recipients notes that he only received the book in late November. This was just as people were getting into the busy holiday season.

In the comments one of the recipients notes that he only received the book in late November. This was just as people were getting into the busy holiday season. He really can't come to any conclusions yet as 6 weeks there has not been enough time for people to write their reviews. He acknowledges this, but discards it, and concludes in essence that most people are thieves who obtained the book under false pretenses. In a year he could make that case, and even then it would only be reasonable if he sent out a few reminders. I am glad to see though that he did publish lists of the reviews he did find so that anyone whose review was overlooked has a chance to respond. Unfortunately, his post there ruins the experiment. I did not participate in the experiment but if I had and was about to go live with my review and then suddenly was publicly accused of being a thief, I would not go forward with an ordinary review publication since it would seem at that point to be trying to wiggle out of something. Instead I would write a blistering criticism of his methodology. The claims and article are so shoddy in fact that it damages my opinion of his work overall. I sometimes write book reviews on my blog. I don't accept free or discounted books, it's just books I've read. I have quite a backlog. Right now I have a stack of 30 books that I will read. Some of these I won't get to for a couple years. Not every one of them will merit a review. It's not reasonable for an author to expect amateur reviewers will get to their book within a few weeks of receiving it, especially when there is no stated deadline. Additional thoughts: * Reading further through the comments on his blog, in the first few comments I found 15 people who mention they are in the process of reading it, or who have not gotten to it yet but plan to. There were more; I just stopped counting at 15. There are no comments (among those first ones at least) from people gloating that they got away with an unwarranted discount. Several fulfill their obligation inline by posting their review thoughts right there in his blog. * It should also be mentioned also that these days even hardcover books in modest quantity are very inexpensive to print when there's no color plates, so the $11 paid almost certainly ensured that money was not lost on the deal as far as printing and shipping costs goes. * Deep down in the comments Scheiner responds to the comments and it seems he realizes he screwed up with his post and drastically underestimated the number of people who take a while to get around to and complete reading a book.