Editorial policy

Independence

Shelf & Sound accepts no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, no free products and no publisher relationships. Nobody can pay to appear here, to appear more favorably, or to have something removed.

The site is funded by Amazon Associates signup fees, which is disclosed in full on our affiliate disclosure and stated again above the first link on every page that carries one. That gives us a financial interest in you subscribing, and the only meaningful check on it is structural: this site publishes recommendations that cost it money, including several pages that conclude a free library card is the better answer. If those pages ever vanish, the independence claim has gone with them.

Sourcing

• Prices, trial terms and eligibility come from the program's own page, are cited by URL, and carry the date they were checked.
• Anything we cannot verify is omitted, and the omission is stated. We do not estimate, average, or carry figures over from other sites.
• Statistics require a named source. No unsourced catalog sizes, no invented percentages.
• Our own arithmetic shows its working, so you can reproduce it rather than trust it.

The full method, including the current list of things we could not verify, is on how we research.

What we will never publish

• A claim to have listened to or read something we have not. No invented first-hand trials, no narrator opinions, no implied experience of a catalog. This is the easiest lie to tell in this category and we do not tell it.
• Invented reviews, testimonials or ratings, in visible copy or in structured data. This site emits no review or rating markup of any kind, because it has no reviews.
• Credentials or experience the author does not have. No manufactured tenure, no fictional editorial team, no titles nobody holds.
• Fabricated urgency. No countdowns, no “limited time” on an offer we have not confirmed has an end date.
• Guidance on removing copy protection from audiobooks or ebooks. It breaches the terms of the services we cover and it is a good way for a reader to get software they did not want.
• Pages that hide the free option. Where a public library is the better answer, the page says so, regardless of what it costs us.

Corrections

We will get things wrong, particularly as programs change their terms. When that happens:

1. Tell us at info@shelfandsound.com or through the contact form. A link to the page helps.
2. We check the claim against the program's own page rather than against our own memory.
3. If it is wrong, we fix it promptly and update the page's review date. Where a correction is material, we say what changed.

We do not quietly edit a page and leave the old review date in place. The date is a claim about when a human last checked, and moving it without checking would be a lie in the one place this site cannot afford one.

Update cadence

• Immediately — whenever a program changes a price, trial length, promotion or eligibility rule that we know about.
• Monthly — both programs' terms are re-checked against their own pages.
• Quarterly — money and decision pages are reviewed and the arithmetic re-run.
• Annually — a full accuracy sweep, including year-stamped titles.

A page's dateModified reflects a real review. It is not bumped on deploy, because a freshness signal that is not true is just a lie told in structured data.

Authorship

Pages are written by Shelf & Sound's writer, whose byline appears on each article and links to the about page. There is no ghostwritten “editorial team” standing in for a headcount that does not exist.