I understand your points Larry, but I think you're overreacting. Don't delude yourself, as a blogger you're being tracked already, as best as the publishers that send your ARC can afford and can manage to (this requires time and personel, so it's money in the end). And if you keep receiving their ARCs, it's perhaps because they're happy with how you're dealing with things, and when you had to beg a lot, it's perhaps because not quite all bloggers act like you do and they have reservations on treating bloggers as they do the press as a result.

By having a more formal method for the bloggers at large, they're merely simplifying matters for them, and saving money. Money they take from the pockets of their customers, down the line.

A lot of what's in there is already part of the unwritten rules of the relationship between the professional press and the publishers. They don't need to tell the press they would like reviews within a month of the book's release (and not to publish anything as long as there's an embargo). If a media decides to pick a book for review, a timely one is the norm. Many bloggers will do the same, but many need to be explained this is what a publisher hopes for when it's sending ARCs to the press. If you wish to review books released years or even months ago, when it's now well outside the limits of the promotional campaign for a book, you're falling completely outside the norms of the professional press. Why then should this be done at the cost of the publisher,taken straight out of the promotional budget of the book?

The number of book reviewers has exploded exponentially in the last decade, and the tendency is only increasing. More and more requests for ARC must be coming their way. It's perfectly normal publishers want to find a more cost-efficient and rational way to deal with this new opportunity for exposure while making sure it's worth it business-wise.

The professional press is a different matter. A lot of those publications are journalistic in nature, with a long and valued tradition of independence. The publishers can't really hope to influence them and need to play the game. Sending ARCs systematically is so ingrained it's part of the fixed cost of publishing. They're on a budget, they target. They have a good budget, they go wide. Now they usually have increased their printing and shipments of ARCs to reach the "non professional reviewers" too. There's all sort of people out there, some are purely into it to read for free, some are nearly professionals and deal ethically with the publishers - and so there's a mutual relationship of interest there. It's perfectly normal the publishers want to ensure the limited amount of ARC for bloggers they can afford for each book reach as many of the second type and as little of the first type as possible.

Asking reviewers to fill a form, request specific titles they are interested in reviewing instead of all the titles, and provide links so the publisher can do with more ease and more cost-efficiently what they would attempt to do anyway is just reasonable. They may not pay the bloggers, no more than they pay the press, but they certainly pay so the bloggers can review with a free copy. Why should they send 10 ARC a month to them, when they know full well that person only review 5-6 books a month and not very often pick one from them? Considering the massive number of blogs, they might have well burn part of their promotional budget, the impact on their book sales will be the same.

It's a new issue the communicators, retailers, ad agencies and so on are all too aware of, and are finding ways to deal with: the number of "non professional media", is exploding these years, and it's expected to continue to grow exponentially. The ad agency I often freelance for has 5 person on staff (out of maybe 150 people, and they often contract specialized firms for particular research projects) whose sole job is studying the internet, its tendencies, its opportunities and its pitfalls and traps.