Scott Turow And The Politics of Cowardice by Barry Eisler. Joe sez: Here's an essay from bestselling author Barry Eisler, which I'm pleased to post here. Barry: There are a lot of substantively interesting aspects of "Authors Guild" president Scott Turow's April 7 New York Times op-ed, "The Slow Death of the American Author. " Indeed, you could write a long article debunking all the factual mistakes, legal errors, misleading claims, and failures of logic that comprise Turow's screed. Happily, Mike Masnick of TechDirt has done so, in a devastatingly well-argued and empirically based piece called "Authors Guild's Scott Turow: The Supreme Court, Google, Ebooks, Libraries and Amazon Are All Destroying Authors. " I won't repeat what Masnick has already so ably pointed out, and will instead add just a few observations of my own.
First, look at the titles of Turow's and Masnick's pieces, and ask yourself which is the more accurate encapsulation of Turow's argument. Here's another one I like -- a small but a nice example. A final thought. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. A List of Things Scott Turow Doesn’t Care About. Scott Turow woke up from his slumber recently to bark nonsense about Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads on the Authors Guild blog, before being thoroughly eviscerated in the comments. Undeterred, Turow sought out the considerably larger platform of the New York Times’ Op-Ed pages on Monday to decry The Slow Death of the American Writer. On reading the latter, my first thought was: if Scott Turow didn’t spend so much time hating Amazon and pretending self-publishing didn’t exist, maybe he wouldn’t be so depressed.
It’s easy to poke fun at Scott Turow’s views. A child could de-construct his arguments, while laughing at how a practicing lawyer is unable to grasp the definition of the word “monopoly.” If you want a proper debunking of his Op-Ed, Techdirt do a good job, but I think there’s no real point attempting to engage Turow on this issue. His hatred of Amazon and fear of change is completely clouding his logic. Price-fixing He didn’t even want to find out if price-fixing was taking place. Authors Guild's Scott Turow: The Supreme Court, Google, Ebooks, Libraries & Amazon Are All Destroying Authors. We've written more than a few times about Scott Turow, a brilliant author, but an absolute disaster as the Luddite-driven head of the Authors' Guild. During his tenure, he's done a disservice to authors around the globe by basically attacking everything new and modern -- despite any opportunities it might provide -- and talked up the importance of going back to physical books and bookstores.
He's an often uninformed champion of a past that never really existed and which has no place in modern society. He once claimed that Shakespeare wouldn't have been successful under today's copyright law because of piracy, ignoring the fact that copyright law didn't even exist in the age of Shakespeare. His anti-ebook rants are just kind of wacky. However, in his latest NY Times op-ed, he's basically thrown all of his cluelessness together in a rambling mishmash of "and another thing", combined with his desire to get those nutty technology kids off his lawn.
Yes, that's right. Turow is a lawyer. How the Authors Guild Is Kind of Like the NRA and Why Scott Turow Is Wrong About Authors. The Slow Death of the American Author.