Ebook About Home Exchange: No Review, No Recommendation

In a recent edition of a travel ezine I subscribe to I noticed that amongst the list of eBooks available to buy from the site, there was one on home exchange that claimed to be: 'the orginal, definitive guidebook', 'explains everything you need to know about home swapping', 'This eBook is the way to get started', 'Get this report and bring your dreams of luxurious world travel to life...' (the bold and italics are as in the promotional blurb). Those are pretty impressive claims and so I was eager to have a copy to review, with the idea of recommending it to readers of this blog and Home Base Holidays members if it was, indeed, a comprehensive and useful guide, especially for those new to home exchange.

Most publishers and authors are delighted to receive extra publicity from reviews, especially those that will be read by their target market and thus likely to generate a good number of sales, but not this one. On requesting a review copy, I received the following reply:

'Our website has a policy of not releasing any eBooks for review, even if it may potentially increase sales. Our contracts also include a clause that prevents us from promoting the author's work anywhere except for on our authorized sites.'

Perhaps that's a standard policy with eBooks sales? I don't know. It just seems odd and restrictive when any sales of the eBook would be made through a link on the site, thus benefiting both the author and the business. Perhaps there's a fear that the eBook would be copied (always a possibility when any information is made available)? Whatever, on reading the promotional blurb further, I see that the author, although having run a small home exchange agency for seven years, doesn't appear to actually have been involved in the business in any way for the last seven years. What happened to the agency? As there have been many changes in recent years, maybe this is a warning that the information is not likely to be up-to-date. There was no indication of the length of the report either. It's really not worth paying for an eBook sight unseen, with no reviews available, when there is so much information on home exchange now freely available on the internet.