Scott Turow, author and president of the Authors Guild, laments over the "slow death" of American authors.

Author and president of the Authors Guild Scott Turow laments over the "slow death" of American authors in an opinion piece published in the New York Times. The author blames libraries, publishers and copyright changes for this sad state of American authors, leading to their depleting income.

Turow expressed his opinion against the Supreme Court's ruling last month which allowed the importation and resale of foreign editions of works by American authors. This, Turow says, would "open the gates to a surge in cheap imports", for which authors will not get royalties.

"It is the latest example of how the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors' income streams. It seems almost every player - publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars - is vying for position at authors' expense," writes Turow.

Turow also stated that pirate eBook sites are also adding to this "slow death." He reveals that when he did a search on the Internet for 'Scott Turow free eBooks', out of the first 10 results on Yahoo, all were pirate sites. On Bing, 8 out of 8 were pirate sites, and on Google, 6 out of the top 10 had pirated eBooks. What surprised Turow even more was the fact that all these search engines had paid ads on these search results.

"If I stood on a corner telling people who asked where they could buy stolen goods and collected a small fee for it, I'd be on my way to jail. And yet even while search engines sail under mottos like 'Don't be evil', they do the same thing," he says.

While bestselling authors Jodi Picoult and Michael Connelly supported his opinion, others were quick to criticize it, calling it a "hysterical rant full of slipshod reasoning that shows again the Guild's propensity for tactical errors and alienating potential allies."