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To all my lovely blog followers,

It is with a pretty broken heart that I have to announce that I will no longer be able to post character photos directly on the blog or on the Facebook page. The blog isn’t in any kind of trouble or anything official, but this is a precautionary measure.

I guess it was easier for it to not think about this when I was a smaller, unknown little blog but now that its popularity and regular visitors has grown considerably, I just can’t take the risk of posting them.

The plain truth of it is that, unless you own the rights to an image, it is subject to copyright laws which legally do not allow ANYONE to post it for ANY reason without the express permission of its owner. And yes, that means that sites like Pinterest, many Facebook pages etc that have gorgeous yummy pics for us to drool over are, in fact, technically, illegal.

It sucks. There is no way around it. But the fact is that in the last while, ever since the explosion of image sharing, there have been law firms that have opened up with the express purpose of shaking down the little people for minor photo violations. Its not like a ginormous multi-billion dollar law-suit, but its $4,000 here, $10,000 there… and it adds up for them and is pretty devasting for the blogger.

So I kinda came to the conclusion that honestly, I can’t take that risk. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t making any money off them (which I wasn’t), it wouldn’t matter if I put a disclaimer, it wouldn’t matter if I gave full image credit or even linked back to the original source, there is literally NOTHING I could do that would make it legal short of getting the express permission of each photo’s copywrite owner. And the truth is ANYONE who posts an image that they do not own ANYWHERE is taking a big risk. If you are a blogger/author/reader who has some such pictures up, I’d strongly recommend reading some of the laws, cuz they are S.C.A.R.Y.

Seriously, its breaking my heart to do this. I can’t tell you guys how much I truely, with all my heart, LOVE casting the books I read at the end of my review. It completes my review to me. But, hosting those images on my blog is not legal and if I want to keep my blog running, I have to make some hard choices.

So… where does that leave us? The blog and all its reviews/quotes etc will keep running exactly like it always has – nothing about that will change. I will still be reading and reviewing 3-5 new books per week and still be hunting down all the swooniest stories to share with you, I will still be hosting giveaways every few weeks, I will be maintaining all my ‘Top 10 lists’ etc and basically everything else that you see normally on the blog will continue as usual.

The only thing that unfortunately will have to change, is that there won’t be character visuals directly in my review 🙁 … however, what I WILL be able to do instead, is to post links at the bottom of the reviews where the character images used to be to the images that I find that best look like the characters that you can click and go to if you would like a visual, but the image just won’t be hosted directly on my site.

Bear with me with that feature. I have a lot of work to do to make that feature available back through all my past reviews on top of keeping up with my regular to-read lists.

I’m also going to start expanding certain areas of the blog to make, for example, a bad boy zone, a YA zone, erotica zone, PNR zone, contemporary romance zone etc, and also an ‘if-you-loved-this, you-will-love-that’ area… and hopefully be able to tack on other fun stuff along the way as the site grows.

I’m really, really sorry to those of you who loved this aspect of the Facebook page and blog. I loved it too. No, I LOVED it. I feel like I just spent all day building a gorgeous, elaborate sandcastle just to have it smushed down by a giant wave. But thats the reality of the law, and those are the risks that come with a site that gets progressively more traffic.

I really hope that you guys will stick around. I love chatting books with each of you both on comments here on the blog, on the Facebook page, and on Twitter, I love hearing your inputs, getting/giving recommendations, and just sharing in the joy of reading 😀

Thank you all for your support, for your participation, and for just coming around and reading the blog. I see the number of people that check in every month and it just makes me so, so happy to see how many of you love it here.

Happy reading everyone!!

~Aestas

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net