Scott Turow's presidency is doing The Authors Guild a disservice

In case you missed it, novelist Scott Turow has taken to the New York Times to decry "The Slow Death of the American Author." If you were wondering about the American author's demise, the causes of death - according to Turow - include but are not limited to: Search engines, foreign editions being sold on the domestic market, the "global electronic marketplace," offshore pirate sites and the Fair Use doctrine.

This otherwise-banal argument is given much more weight by Turow's role as the president of The Authors Guild. I have to think he is doing The Authors Guild a disservice by his presidency, which seems to be predicated upon a reactionary rejection of everything newfangled, without offering any actual solutions for the problems he sees.

Turow reminds me of the Amish, who have essentially decided that every technology which was invented after eighteen-hundred-and-whatever is evil. The Amish have drawn a line in the sand, and while each Amish sect draws that line in a different place, the line remains the same: "Beyond this, you're going to Hell."

I can certainly understand where Turow is coming from, but he's not griping about technology on his personal blog. He's griping about it to the world, in the New York Times, in his official capacity as Authors Guild president. And I would have hoped that someone in his position would be more focused on finding solutions than on telling those kids to get off his lawn.

Turow's style of useless wheel-spinning is as popular as it is, well, useless. You can't put the genie back into the bottle. And there's no point in sitting around complaining about the genie's misdeeds. Instead, the president of The Authors Guild needs to focus on finding solutions, and on promoting those aspects of technology which can be helpful to struggling and mid-list authors.

Or, sure, Turow can spend the rest of his tenure carping about the things that annoy him, thus wasting everyone's time, including his own. It may not be the best choice, but it seems to be the one he's picking.

Image courtesy Flickr/Fairfax Library Foundation