Following objections from the Authors Guild in the US, Amazon has caved on the text-to-speech features of the new Kindle 2 ebook reader. It will now enable publishers and authors to disable the text-to-speech (TTS) function if they want.
There shouldn't be anything controversial about TTS: it's been available on personal computers since the 1970s. It's important to people who have impaired or no vision, but little used by anyone else. However, the Authors Guild argues that the audio rights for a book are different from the reading rights, even if the audio is provided by a software robot.
In The Kindle Swindle? in The New York Times, Roy Blount Jr, president of the Authors Guild, argues that "Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights." He says:
True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.
You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter" or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.
But "quite listenable" is not the same as a real audiobook, as author Neil Gaiman -- "someone who loves audiobooks, records his own audiobooks, makes a not-insignificant portion of his income from audiobooks and has even won awards for bloody audiobooks" -- has pointed out. He says:
An audio book, read by someone who's good at it, is an audio book, an experience that's different to, sometimes complementary to, the words on the page. A computer reading to you is a computer reading to you. And at the point where they can read books to us as well as we can read them aloud to each other, we will have other things to worry about.
In a post headed Caving in to bullies (aka, here we go again), Lawrence Lessig, lawyer and founding board member of Creative Commons, points out that "We had this battle before. In 2001, Adobe released e-book technology that gave rights holders (including publishers of public domain books) the ability to control whether the Adobe e-book reader read the book aloud."
It's bad news for readers, Lessig says:
But the bigger trend here is much more troubling: Innovative technology company (Amazon (Kindle 2), Google (Google Books)) releases new innovative way to access or use content; so-called "representatives" of rights owners, Corleone-like, baselessly insist on a cut; innovative technology company settles with baseless demanders, and we're all arguably worse off.
We're worse off with the Kindle because if the right get set by the industry that publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn't given them -- the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me -- users and innovators have less freedom. And we may be worse off with Google Books, because (in ways not clear when the settlement was first reported) the consequence of the class action mechanism may well disable users and innovators from doing what fair use plainly entitled Google to do.
On Friday, the Guardian's Books Blog pointed out that:
Clearly the Authors Guild wants to take a firm position early about the emerging technology, but this campaign seems misguided. If it weren't, one might expect the first people to side with the Authors Guild to be Amazon, since, as well as manufacturing the Kindle, the company owns Audible, a download site which accounts for 95% of the online audiobook market.
Well, it seems that if it hasn't quite sided with the Authors Guild, Amazon has gone a long way towards it.
