Who Moved My Buy Button? is Authors Guild’s latest attempt to separate authors from works

Freakonomics, the well-known blog maintained by The New York Times, has an interesting post about the Authors Guild’s new anti-Amazon Who Moved My Buy Button? project, noting that the Guild “plainly views Amazon as something less than a trusted partner.” Hilarious, considering that the Guild, which represents a mere 8,000 authors, conspired with its publishing allies to sell the copyrighted works of tens of thousands of non-Guild authors to Google for $125 million. At first glance, Who Moved My Buy Button? seems like a benevolent attempt by the Guild to monitor the activities of Amazon. But a closer look reveals that the project is nothing more than the latest attempt by the Guild to separate non-member authors from their written works by assuming an ill-defined custodial role over ISBNs.