Late last night, I received a long and heartfelt email from a reader who had left a comment months ago on a review of a book that I’d posted earlier this year. I hadn’t liked the book much for very specific reasons, and this reader had agreed in a comment.

But now the reader was asking me to remove that comment entirely because of a fear of being sued, thanks to the recent lawsuit by Ellora’s Cave against the Dear Author blog.

Never mind that the EC suit is ostensibly about DA reporting on possible financial issues at EC. Never mind that this wasn’t even an EC book. Thanks to the chilling environment EC is attempting to foster with their actions, some innocent reader of my tiny blog is worried enough to ask me to remove a comment just in case. And I did.

And now I’m going to go donate more money to the Dear Author defense fund. Because this nonsense has got to stop.