Theos-Talk Archives (August 1996 Message tl00242)

At 03:53 PM 8/13/96 -0400, Paul wrote:
>

>Sometimes, people want or expect free books on the basis of acquaintance
with the
>author.

        I did not know that this is going on. I am thinking of getting the
e-mail addresses of some of the authors and send them a request.

        With electronic publishing, the full texts can be downloaded and
authors would not have this problem.


>annoying has happened to me.  People assume than an author owes extensive
>justifications or defenses of his work to any individual who chooses
>to criticize or challenge it, even hostile total strangers, and that
>there is no limit to the extent to which this can be expected.  I have
>experienced just a few cases of this, including someone who falsely
>claimed to have read my books and demanding "proof" in long
>angrey letters, in ways that made it clear he had not.  This is harassment.
>I have seen the problem 100fold with David Lane, who gets daily email
>from angry readers and non-readers alike.  Ken Wilber discusses this
>phenomenon in a recent Quest interview; he seems to get huge piles of mail
>from people who expect him to devote vast energies to answering their
>complaints and arguments-- and regard him as arrogant for not
>doing so.

        When electronic publishing in cyberspace, could one imagine the
amount of correspondence that would be generated by e-mail?

>
>Writing a book is an exhausting process, and most authors don't
>want to be further exhausted by subjecting themselves to
>interrogation by unfriendly critics, before or after
>publication.  Especially when experience shows that this kind
>of thing becomes a tar baby, and every attempt to placate your
>critics only makes them more implacable.
>
>I hope this makes clearer the position in which authors find
>themselves, whether or not it is relevant to the case at hand.
>

        Thanks for the information.


        MKR
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