Shadowrun net.book Review Guidelines

This is a new direction for From The Jury's Bench. I had originally intended to publish these in The Shadowrun Supplemental, but decided this would be a more appropriate place. I will continue to write other game-related articles here, and will (hopefully) provide reviews at a regular pace. The first one should be up within 24 hours.<p> To the best of my knowledge, there is no comprehensive listing or review of Shadowrun netbooks available anywhere. I’m not entirely sure why that is, although I have a few ideas:

There aren't enough books to review.
The people likely to produce a book are also the people likely to want to make a book review, and are biased.
There's no real demand for reviews.

I dispute points 1 and 3. There’s a large amount of Shadowrun netbooks already out, and more on the horizon. I also see the frequent question on ShadowRN “Where do I get net.books, and are they any good?”, so I think the demand is there.

Some people may say I'm biased with these reviews, being the editor of this magazine. I don't really feel that there is all that much 'competition' between; say, NERPS and The Shadowrun Supplemental. I think all net.publications have a place, and that most of them don't overlap too badly. (I also think TSS is the best Shadowrun magazine out their, but I'm heavily biased :)

Anyways, to qualify as a net.book, the publications must meet the following requirments:

Must be publicly downloadable for free.
Must be in a common format readable on most computers, these formats include: Postscript, Adobe Acrobat, Rich Text Format, etc. I'm using a Win 95 machine with MS Word 97, so I can open up damn near any file. It does not include HTML, this is largely a personal bias, but I feel HTML is an inferior format to the ones listed above for the publishing of a large work.
Must not infringe on any of FASA's copyrights or trademarks. At the very least, must include the basic FASA disclaimers, examples of which can be seen all over The Shadowrun Archive.

I review each book with 3 basic guidelines:

Art/Layout: If the book pleasing to look at, and easy to read.

Writing: How well the book is written and organized.

Usefullness: How much of this stuff is going to get used in a typical game?

If you have or know of a publication that would like to see reviewed here, let me know at fro@lis.ab.ca