Amazon Detractors Invited to Debate Its Monopolistic Bookselling on Twitter, But None Show Up
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come, as the line from the poem goes, and that almost sums up what we saw on Twitter today.
Earlier today LitChat held a TwitterChat on the #LitChat tag, and invited Authors United and its allies (ABA, The Authors Guild, the AAR) to discuss Au’s recent announcement that it was sending a letter to the US Dept of Justice. (That letter has been covered and rehashed extensively elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it here.)
Alas, no one from Authors United or its allies showed up for the debate, which is unfortunate because the indie viewpoint was well-represented. Passive Guy caught wind of the event and announced it on The Passive Voice blog this morning about four hours before the debate. That gave the usual crew plenty of time to clear a space in our schedules, make some popcorn, and sharpen our wits.
Ably moderated by Judah Freed, the resulting 69-minute debate (it ran long) was as entertaining as it was one-sided. An ABA rep did speak up briefly and state that they were monitoring the discussion, but the active debaters were so clustered on one side of …
Well, I would not normally describe such a diverse group of individuals as a single side in any debate, but almost all the participants in today’s debate showed up with the intent of arguing against Authors United. You can blame the polarizing effect of Authors United for that.
While there were several authors who took the position of AU, the discussion was in fact so one-sided that Hugh Howey decided to play Devil’s Advocate and argue the other side. This led to unfortunate situations where a few participants who were encountering Howey for the first time took his tweets seriously.
All in all, it was an entertaining hour. If you missed it, LitChat archived the discussion in this PDF.
image by Liberal Democrats
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