Describing the character as "full-throttle evil," author Lauren Duca joked that "Even his Hamlet doppelgänger King Claudius was less ruthless".
For example, editor Ellen Datlow tweeted a link to the NYT story and said that Amazon is "evil," while author Lilith Saintcrow (whose novel The Ripper Affair was affected by the changes) described this as an attempt to "blackmail" a publisher in a way that also hurts writers and editors.
"The 80s was the decade when fat became evil!" Shelly McKenzie, the author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, joked to me over the phone.
Arianna and David Frum (coiner of "Axis of Evil" and "Conservative Entertainment Complex", author of e-book Why Romney Lost released on November 8!) discuss several attempted re-boots of early 2013.
Perhaps, as the authors suggest, evil should be taken as a counterpoint to God.
The authors impugn evil capitalists for sending work abroad to chase lower prices, for example, but they mostly let American consumers off the hook for demanding those lower prices in the first place.
(In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Spodey-like Roferick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags").
Or Mr Monk Goes to Jail, where a death-row inmate is poisoned with his final meal (so his organs can't be donated to save the life of an evil billionaire suing the author of a book about him, who happens to be the son of the prison literacy teacher)?
God is not the author of evil, for "nothing was made without him" (sine ipso factum est nihil, John 1 3).
And if an agent is an "author of evil," he is therefore implicated in the evil and cannot be morally pure or holy.
