Here's another good rebuttal:
http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2...nt-care-about/
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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.
What bothers me about Turow’s obsession with Amazon and his opposition to change is not his blatant disregard for the facts (or the definition of words), it’s that he allows this Luddism to become all-consuming, blinding him to the issues that really matter to writers.
Even if we granted Turow his brain-dead thesis, we still have time before Amazon becomes The Great Evil and exclusively powers its website with the tears of exploited writers.
But there’s a bunch of really awful stuff happening right now that Turow ignores, and has been ignoring, since his term as Authors Guild President began.
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Among the things he lists as more immediately harmful to authors and aspiring authors are the usual list of publishing scams (at least one of which has ties to the Guild itself), bad contracts, publishers' retroactive rights grabs, the Price Fix conspiracy...
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When rumors first broke that the Department of Justice was investigating collusion to fix prices between five of the six largest trade publishers in the US (Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette) and Apple, Scott Turow called for the investigation to be dropped.
He didn’t even want to find out if price-fixing was taking place. Turow, a practicing lawyer, didn’t want to know if federal law was being broken.
When the DOJ determined that collusion to fix prices had indeed taken place, and reached a settlement with three of the five publishers (the other two would settle in time), Turow opposed the settlement.
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The one thing that comes through is that there is as little visibility into the Guild's operations and goals (other than luddite Op-Ed pieces) as any old-timey closed country club. For all the joking about it being more of a Publisher's Guild the reality doesn't seem to be too far away...