Industry & Advocacy News
October 23, 2013
When Scott Turow stopped by CBS This Morning last week to promote his new book, Identical, co-anchor Charlie Rose turned the discussion to Turow’s “beef with Amazon,” while Norah O’Donnell brought up his April New York Times piece on “The Slow Death of the American Author.”
Turow said Amazon’s below-cost ebook pricing, “destroys physical bookstores and drives the reading public into the ebook, which of course Amazon dominates. They’re a great competitor and I don’t mind fair operation of the market. I don’t like unfair tactics.”
Responding to O’Donnell, Turow then listed other flash points, adding that bestselling authors are doing fine, the concern is how these affect the prospects for other working authors (who, of course, write most of the books that wind up in libraries and bookstores):
“Authors are being attacked at all sides. Publishers want to reduce royalties on ebooks. Search engines lead people to pirated books. Companies like Google want to use copyrighted material in response to searches; even librarians want to join in that effort. Some academics want to get rid of copyright.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” Charlie Rose asked.
“Fight back,” Turow said. “That’s all you can [do]: fight back. It’s a many faceted battle.”
You can view Scott’s interview below. The discussion about authors and the book industry begins at the 2:00 min mark.
