SFWA vice-president Howard Hendrix illustrates the organization’s ironic technological myopia:
I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.
Thus speaks the heart of a would-be monopolist. I’m not posting my writing here, professionally published and unpublished, because I want to let people read them, but because I want to undercut Howard Hendrix.
SFWA president-in-waiting John Scalzi – for whom I voted – sums it up nicely: “I don’t particularly have anything to say about it, other than to classify it as something akin to a buggy-whip manufacturer railing against the pernicious influence of the automobile.”
This obnoxious species utterly merits their coming extinction. They won’t be missed.