I am not a webscab. Howard Hendrix, vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, calls people who write content and give it away for free on the internet “webscabs”. Here is an excerpt:
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.
Does this infer that if you write for your own pleasure and let others read your work without charge (i.e. you are a blogger and/or self-publishing author who lets people download some of your work for free), that you are a webscab? I don’t think so. I have to question Howard’s logic in this. “Scab” in Australian parlance is a strike-breaker, and is a pretty harsh term.
I buy a lot of books, including a fair number of science fiction books. For myself, I am going to go out of my way to not purchase any book by Howard Hendrix. Plenty of people have already ranted over the posting.
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