Authors Guild president to Amazon: No, thanks. We don’t want your money.

A Q&A with Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson.

The contract dispute between Amazon.com and Hachette Book Group has delayed the shipment of thousands of titles. The battle took another turn as Amazon reached out to Hachette authors with an offer to immediately begin offering the delayed books again and give its share of Hachette digital book sales to the authors for the duration of the dispute -- if the publisher would also forgo its share of the revenue.

What do authors think? Robinson isn't buying it, saying the offer is merely a tactic to bully the publisher into conceding to unfavorable terms. When presented with that argument, Amazon said that writers against the deal are "conflating the long-term structure of the industry with a short-term proposal designed to take authors...out of the line of fire."

“The Amazon letter didn't really take us out of the middle; it asked us to take sides against our publishers,” Robinson said. "It also seems to assume that what we really want is a short-term windfall, which is what we get if Amazon asked Hachette to give up revenues from e-books. But we want a healthy publishing ecosystem, a system of commerce in which we’re not trying to kill each other or drive each other out of business.” She added that the government should step in whenever a single company has too much power, it creates “a situation in which legal intervention would make sense.”