Bookish Musings: Hello! I'm.... An International Blogger

This topic has probably already been talked about, whispered in secret, shared, chewed on, put down,  disregarded, shredded, dissected, and dismissed multiple times over Twitter, Facebook, and even Instagram. (Note: This post is going to be a 2 part series.) You might ask, what's been happening? Well here's a little bit of a low down.  

• Goodreads and Netgalley has put up restrictions on who wins or gets approved for ARC books (eARC for that matter).
• If eARCs are already scarce print ARCs are harder to get.
• In light of the 2 concerns above, many authors (and I guess publishers) are cracking down on people who download pirated PDF versions of their books online.
• Books are expensive in our country.
• Did you say libraries?
• The free books we get is the pay we get for what we love to do. 

If you guys noticed it's a snowball effect. One small change has made this big of an impact on so many international bloggers like me. I did a small thread rant in twitter that I want to expound on a little bit more in my blog. It's a little but disheartening.

Goodreads and Netgalley

Personally, Goodreads' only use for me is to keep track of what I've read, look up some recs from friends, and do the yearly reading challenge. They usually have giveaways that I've tried joining but I've never won anything from there. One of the issues of this site is starting January 2018, they charge an arm and a leg for authors to post their giveaways on their site and the winners are now only restricted to US for the time being. I live in Asia, in a small country called the Philippines. Good luck winning any of those books. 

Netgalley on the other hand, who gives eARCs has also put a restriction to publishers to whom they would approve request from. Those are already electronic copies and if I don't live on a specific place on the map I won't get approved?  Speakeing of ARC, I've gotten about 2 print copies and a few ebooks in the 10 months that I've been blogging and those are from very nice authors who have debut novels. I've tried writing a couple of publishers to no avail. And then I see this tweet:

C'mon people! We exist over here trying so hard to get copies of books we can review and share in our own country. We used to be part of a world wide community. Now it's "them and us". WTH? The struggle is real. 

Price of books, Libraries, and Piracy. 

Ok, so I've already been been ranting but this one just makes me shake my head in frustration. First off is the price of books. We always base the price of books on the dollar price of US publishers. Even bookstores in my country do that. Usually a mainstream paperback book would cost us around Php1000+ or $20+, it's more if the books are hardbound. I don't make that much money to be able to splurge on more than 1 book a month. Yeah sure I work to be able to afford to buy books but that's not the only thing I need to live (I wish it was). This leads to many people, not just bloggers, to scour the net and find ebooks that have been shared so that they could read books with out breaking the bank.

As this author so "nicely" (*eye roll*) put it - GO TO A LIBRARY! It's free. *sigh* I don't need to explain to be defensive, it's just sad reality. We do not have free public libraries in my country. We have a huge National Library, and there are schools with their own small collection of books. None of these libraries carry up to date fiction. Heck, even my own University library which is the 2nd biggest University library in our country had a tiny room for fiction. I just accidentally found it one day and the books there were at least 20 years old at that time.

Mind you we do not condone piracy in any way. We are aware that books are some authors bread and butter and that there are legit avenues where we can "borrow" ebooks over the web. Again with the explanation. Most of those sites do not give access to international "borrowers" and the ones that do (Gutenburg..did I spell that right?) have books that are so dated I can just go to any University library and get them there. Again with the them and us. Tell us again why we look the other way when people just download the free ebooks instead of buying them or borrowing them from a library?

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If the tone of my rants have not given away how I feel yet then I'll spell it out - FRUSTRATED. Why should there be distinction between US and International Bloggers? Why can some authors go out of their way to send us ARCs but the majority of publishers can't? Don't we make up at least 60% of the world readers who you would want to sell your books to and not just the US?

I just have one question. If you are a US or International reader/blogger, what do you think about what's been happening? Leave your thoughts in the comments and let's discuss the sh*t out of this topic. LOL.

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