Authors Guild Hates Change, Attacks the Writers It’s Says It Wants to Protect

Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel has a

great piece at Bloomberg View about how the Authors
Guild (est. 1912) is attacking an upstart group, the Authors
Alliance, and teh Internet BECAUSE COPYRIGHT!

It’s only a little more complicated than that. The Authors Guild
sued Google for daring to digitize books, thus allowing potential
readers to discover them online (the Guild lost its case).

On the Guild’s official blog, a member attacked the Author’s
Alliance as “an astroturf organization” tailored to “academics and
hobbyists” rather than real writers. The alliance bills itself as
support for “authors who write to be read.” 

Postrel neatly dissects what’s wrong with the Authors Guild’s
attempt to hold back the march of time, technology, and a rival
advocacy group.

The Internet has unquestionably made it more difficult to make a
living as a writer. But the problem isn’t copyright infringement.
It’s competition. We’ve gone from a world in which reading material
was relatively scarce and expensive to one in which it’s
overabundant and nearly free. And it’s much, much harder to get
readers to hear about your book. Reviews and excerpts get lost in
the vast sea of online content. Online retailers haven’t found good
substitutes for bookstore browsing. Scanning books to make them
searchable doesn’t hurt sales. It gives those works a prayer of
being found.

It also saves books from
“digital oblivion.” For increasing numbers of readers, a book that
doesn’t show up in a Google search or can’t be linked to in some
way online might as well not exist. The scanning the Authors Guild
wants to block rescues old titles from the memory hole. Going
forward, it means that today’s new titles will have a chance of
enduring, at least as searchable files, for as long as the websites
are preserved by the Internet Archive. Do you want your latest book
to be as easy to discover in 10 years as one of today’s cat videos
or Buzzfeed listicles? Or do you want it to go down the memory hole
unless you post it online for free?

Postrel notes that there is a “perverse logic” to the Guild’s
stance. Its members who are writing new books benefit if older ones
are not as easy to find (even as that makes it harder to write
well-researched new books). But this is bad thinking, especially
from folks who typically talk about how important it is to be
grounded in history and tradition. Fact is, the publishing
establishment and certainly those who are well compensated under
the status quo publishing world hate change and the general
leveling that’s been made possible via the Internet. If you’re,
say, Erica Jong (a
critic of the Authors Alliance and anything that threatens a
system that has rewarded her handsomely), it’s easy to understand
why you fear change. But for the rest of us trying to make a living
putting pixel to page? Not so much.

Whole Postrel piece here.