Authors VS Readers? The Amazon-Hachette Controversy
From the Last Great Act of Defiance Department, Author Division: yes, it's true, Amazon is a predator, a bully, a scavenger of a culture it has helped to strangle, and yeah, they really want to be the Marketplace of the Universe. The only one. They also apparently haven't actually read any Orwell.
You can read about Authors United v Readers United and the Amazon Orwell slip-up here >>
But banding together to defend Hachette strikes me as the same sort of reactionary folly as collectively deciding that we should all now support and save Barnes & Noble because--after decades of driving independent stores from communities, corporatizing and centralizing selection and event decisions, and enacting all sorts of schemes to direct or dictate reader taste and writers' directions to readers and writers and publishers alike--they ran into an organization that does those things even more ruthlessly, and better.
Hachette is part of a cabal of major publishers who have skewed the industry away from diversity and invention and choice and art and exploration, toward centralization, idolization of the few, deification of the Bookscan line in the most myopic, this-instant sense. They don't care about writing. They don't care about authors. They don't care about readers. They certainly don't care about me, or you. They're right that writing should be worth more. But the truth is, the actual work of creating art has become (maybe always was) so devalued that lots of people feel perfectly justified in not paying for their art at all, but stealing it off their favorite pdf/torrent clearinghouse of choice. The real battle we should unite behind is getting people to recognize that honoring and paying good money for each other's creativity is good for authors, readers, writers, students, parents, teachers, lovers...it's the thing that could save us. Possibly the only thing.
So you all go on waving that flag, you United Authors for Corporate Profits, you United Readers for Cheap Content. I'm going to go write something. And hope somebody somewhere enjoys what I do enough to find some way to acknowledge what I've done by paying me something so I can write more of it.
You can read about Authors United v Readers United and the Amazon Orwell slip-up here >>
But banding together to defend Hachette strikes me as the same sort of reactionary folly as collectively deciding that we should all now support and save Barnes & Noble because--after decades of driving independent stores from communities, corporatizing and centralizing selection and event decisions, and enacting all sorts of schemes to direct or dictate reader taste and writers' directions to readers and writers and publishers alike--they ran into an organization that does those things even more ruthlessly, and better.
Hachette is part of a cabal of major publishers who have skewed the industry away from diversity and invention and choice and art and exploration, toward centralization, idolization of the few, deification of the Bookscan line in the most myopic, this-instant sense. They don't care about writing. They don't care about authors. They don't care about readers. They certainly don't care about me, or you. They're right that writing should be worth more. But the truth is, the actual work of creating art has become (maybe always was) so devalued that lots of people feel perfectly justified in not paying for their art at all, but stealing it off their favorite pdf/torrent clearinghouse of choice. The real battle we should unite behind is getting people to recognize that honoring and paying good money for each other's creativity is good for authors, readers, writers, students, parents, teachers, lovers...it's the thing that could save us. Possibly the only thing.
So you all go on waving that flag, you United Authors for Corporate Profits, you United Readers for Cheap Content. I'm going to go write something. And hope somebody somewhere enjoys what I do enough to find some way to acknowledge what I've done by paying me something so I can write more of it.
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