Authors Guild to Audible: No Tags Back!

This matter is a bit outside RF’s bailiwick but of interest to those concerned with digital rights.

The Authors Guild is firing a warning shot across the bow of BMS (Bezos’ Majesty’s Ship) Audible:

“We are sharing with you a letter to Audible’s CEO Bob Carrigan and General Counsel Stas Zakharenko, demanding that Audible end its practice of encouraging its monthly subscribers to return or exchange audiobooks they have purchased and deducting the earned royalties for those audiobooks from authors’ accounts. Audible is promoting this easy exchange policy as a benefit to increase its subscriber base, allowing listeners to purchase and listen to entire audiobooks and then return them for a refund or exchange them for a new book—all at the detriment of authors’ earnings. This is not an exchange policy, but an unauthorized audiobook rental arrangement supported by authors’ reversed royalties, and it must stop.”

If interested, you may sign the letter/petition here.

RF doesn’t have stake in this game. The Authors Guild has been notably hostile to digital content in libraries, backing among other things Macmillan’s since abandoned “windowing” of content. Two cheers for them in this case, though. One feels bad for consumers. Like libraries, even they don’t own the digital content they buy. They must consume it under license. Unlike with print books, they can’t resell it and then buy more to support authors (or donate for a library book sale and share the good). And RF is not so sure the Authors Guild wouldn’t spike the used book market if it only could. On the other hand, a sale is a sale. (A license is a license? Nah, doesn’t work.) Picking an author’s pocket after she or he has collected the hard-earned for a book well done seems like the work of an unreformed Scrooge, a chiseler, a stingy stinker, A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave (give us this day our daily Shakespeare). Audible, call a different play!

Note to authors: however suspicious of libraries the Authors Guild might say you should be, at least we will never take back what you have earned.