I wanted to take a second to share the contrarian opinion in support of OP's use of affiliate links.
He/she did a lot of work to make this project and to maintain it. I think they are done tastefully and sensibly in a service that adds value.
He/she did a lot of work to make this project and to maintain it. I think they are done tastefully and sensibly in a service that adds value.
Moreover, I'd like to add that affiliate links are less intrusive and dangerous wrt to malicious code and user privacy. I wonder why Adsense et al rarely get called out, but affiliate links do. Maybe it's my confirmation bias or it's because people don't see those other ads, because of using an ad blocker.
I think your hunch is correct — we hover over the links and see it in the query string. There's probably a Chrome extension out there somewhere to strip affiliate links from URLs, but honestly they've never bothered me because they don't detract from my experience.
When somebody posts a link to Amazon in a comment thread that contains an affiliate code, I think that's fair to criticize. When somebody points to something they built that uses affiliate links, it comes down to how it's presented (and more importantly, how often it's reposted).
Who wouldn't be interested in a followup post 6 months from now with a breakdown of traffic and revenue?
As soon as I heard books I automatically assumed it would have links to amazon. And if you are linking to amazon from your own website you are stupid if you aren't using affiliate links.