Not that they were inclined to believe a publisher in the first place: An ad the Authors Guild has been running for years, doing its part to insure that relations between authors and publishers are never anything less than adverserial

The Author’s Guild may have sold their clients out to Google, but they’re not selling them out to Random House — at least not if the organization’s response to Random CEO Markus Dohle‘s letter on ebook rights on old contracts (see the earlier Moby story) is any indication.

In a letter of its own released to the press yesterday — unsigned but presumeably from director Paul Aiken — the Guild comes on strong, saying, “It’s regrettable and unhelpful that Random House has chosen to try to intimidate authors and agents over these old book contracts.”

(In a side note, it’s interesting to note that despite the hostile language, the letter also makes an attempt at sounding sympathetic to the plight of publishers by observing that “everyone with knowledge of the dynamics of the industry properly fears that Amazon‘s dominance of the online markets for traditional and especially e-books will give it a chokehold on industry profits” — this, from the organization eager to sign away its own membership to the even more ominous “chokehold” of Google — see any number of Moby posts on the Google Book Settlement here.)

As you might expect, the Guild cites the legal case Random lost against RosettaBooks — wherein a judge found Random contracts before 1994 didn’t cover ebooks — as the basis of its counterclaims, and observes one Random policy decision that it thinks says it all:

Random House quite famously changed its standard contract to include e-book rights in 1994. (We remember it well — Random House tried to secure these rights for royalties of 5% of net proceeds, a pittance. We called it a “Land Grab on the Electronic Frontier” in our press release headline.) Random House felt the need to change its contract, quite plainly, because its authors did not grant those rights to it under Random House’s standard contracts prior to 1994.

Random House itself, meanwhile, seemed far less rattled and antagonistic in its response to the response: As a Wall Street Journal story by Jeffrey A. Tracthenberg reports, spokesperson Stuart Applebaum merely said, “Random House respectfully disagrees with the Authors Guild’s point of view, we are looking forward to further future discussions with their members and with the agent community about the dynamic initiatives presented in Mr. Dohle’s letter and about the royalty rate for the backlist titles whose rights we believe are ours to maximize.”