'Intolerable': Authors Against Amazon Speak Out

When literary lions unite, we can only hope that it will strike fear into the hearts of keepers of the Amazon. This week NY Times reports that in addition to Hachette authors, the outcry into the face of the multi-pronged online sales conglomerate now includes the shouts of 300 authors represented by Andrew Wylie Agency (Orhan Pamuk, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie), Ursula K. Le Guin (recipient of the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters), and the estates of Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Hunter S. Thompson. Get 'em! From NYT:

The authors are uniting.

Last spring, when Amazon began discouraging customers from buying books published by Hachette, the writers grumbled that they were pawns in the retailer’s contract negotiations over e-book prices. During the summer, they banded together and publicly protested Amazon’s actions.

Now, hundreds of other writers, including some of the world’s most distinguished, are joining the coalition. Few if any are published by Hachette. And they have goals far broader than freeing up the Hachette titles. They want the Justice Department to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.

They also want to highlight the issue being debated endlessly and furiously on writers’ blogs: What are the rights and responsibilities of a company that sells half the books in America and controls the dominant e-book platform?

Andrew Wylie, whose client roster of heavyweights in literature is probably longer than that of any other literary agent, said he was asking all his writers whether they wanted to join the group, Authors United. Among those who have said yes, Mr. Wylie said in a phone interview from Paris, are Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera. [...]

A recent sign-up to Authors United who is not a Wylie client is Ursula K. Le Guin, the recipient of the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Ray Bradbury and Eudora Welty are among previous winners of the medal, given by the National Book Foundation during its annual awards ceremony in November.

Ms. Le Guin, author of “The Left Hand of Darkness,” the Earthsea series and other award-winning works, will be presented her medal by Neil Gaiman, a regular attendee at the all-expenses-paid Campfire weekend for writers hosted by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive. She has strong feelings about the Amazon-Hachette dispute.

“We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author,” Ms. Le Guin wrote in an email. “Governments use censorship for moral and political ends, justifiable or not. Amazon is using censorship to gain total market control so they can dictate to publishers what they can publish, to authors what they can write, to readers what they can buy. This is more than unjustifiable, it is intolerable.” [...]

Read more at NYT and at the newsstand of your local independent bookstore.