The Energizer Guild

The Author's Guild just doesn't know when to stop, pursuing its quixotic quest against Google for scanning books.

I blogged about this over four years ago, here...

And per the letter I just sent to Paul Aiken today, which I paste below, I wish the Guild would finally get over it, and realize they're wrong.  The Author's Guild could have helped JABberwocky clients, saved them thousands of dollars and had many of them selling e-books years and years ago if they had listened to my advice.

December 30, 2013

Mr. Paul Aiken
The Author’s Guild
31 E. 32nd St. 7th fl.
New York, NY  10016

Dear Mr. Aiken:

You are colossally wrong on Google, and should stop wasting your organization’s money.

You can read my full blog post from 2009 on this subject here
http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-settlement.html

But in essence, I advocated at that time that we force Google to give us a copy of our scanned books so that we could do with them as we please.  This was and is the best settlement and resolution to this, and it is in fact what the publishers ended up accepting.

If the Author’s Guild had obtained for authors what the publishers ended up obtaining for themselves, my author clients could have saved cumulatively tens of thousands of dollars that we have ended up spending to scan their works in order to publish them as e-books, and we might have been able to sell those e-book several years sooner than was otherwise the case.

You’ve ended up costing my authors far more than your “advocacy” will ever be able to gain for them in exchange, should some court end up agreeing with you on this new appeal when everyone else so far hasn’t.

Sincerely,



JOSHUA BILMES
President
joshua@awfulagent.com