I am disgusted by this news. If I find out that a particular author has disabled this feature in his or her kindle books, I will not buy his or her books, at least not new copies. Supposedly they don’t want the competition with their audio books. Audio books are often abridged, so I can see why someone would want the kindle to read a full copy. This strikes me as greed, and pettiness, and reminds me of the e-books licenses which did not grant permission for the work to be read aloud. The authors guild has in recent years pulled some doozies. This one is not the worst. That one would be their attempt to get money from the sale of used books, but this is not that much better. Are they going to charge extra for the privilege of enabling that feature? Do they object because the voice doesn’t read smoothly enough for their tastes? What is next, banning reading any copy of the book aloud in a funny voice?
This just seems like pettiness that will hurt most those who are visually impaired, and those who wanted to have it read to them while they were doing some other task like driving. They may have the right to squeeze every cent out like that, but I will make sure it is not my money.
Wait, audiobooks are often abridged?! I gotta find those. I just cannot sit through 14 hours of some elderly gentleman whose lips are sticking together reading to me.
An artist often wants to have control over how their art is viewed. Reading it aloud yourself is fair use but selling a product in which a digitized voice reads it aloud is not and it does seem that it might undermine the market demand for the artist-controlled version of the book being read aloud.
That said I don’t use audiobooks and do not yet have a Kindle but I have a hard time imagining why anyone would want to listen to a digitized voice reading a good novel when an storyteller read version is available as well. Using the text to voice to hear the newspaper or a magazine article while you drive or some text book section, maybe. But a novel read by a digitized voice as competition for a professional human storyteller reading it?
Why? What If I’m reading the book aloud, not to myself, but to my nephew? Is that not fair use? Text-to-speech isn’t anything new. People have been doing it since writing was invented, and computers have been doing it for years.
Lots of people often want lots of things. I bought it, I’ll consume it as I see fit, thanks.
No one is selling recordings with the Kindle either. No recording is made. It just reads the words. I can pay the nanny to read to the kid, or I can pay Amazon to do it. Even if it did save the recording, I don’t see a problem unless I distribute it.
Granted, I imagine the Kindle text-to-speech sounds like ass. Has anyone heard it? There is a certain value in having a good speaker read a book. Sometimes it’s fun when the author reads it. I’m not sure how one could create a program that could read text that’s toned naturally.
I don’t listen to audiobooks much anyway, since speech is so much slower than reading. A few came in handy when I took a 4-day road trip a while back.
Okay, so they’ll distribute it in paper form, and I produce a device which combines OCR with the Kindle’s text-to-speech. It’s just a robotic reader, and let’s suppose the OCR is sufficiently advanced that errors are negligible.
Is such a device illegal by its very nature?
If it is, doesn’t this make people illegal, since what this machine does is just a subset of what literate people can do?
How is what a Kindle is doing any different?
As long as the resulting audio track isn’t distributed, I can’t see how this infringes on any rights whatsoever.
It creates the same exact performance of the reading each time it is read and it is selling that performance. Is that in essence different than selling a recording? I am not sure but it seems to be the key question.
If your nanny was going around performing a book for money on the scale that Amazon sells books would the authors/publishers have a right to get a cut or demand that she stop?
Perhaps the analogy is best made to music. No one will stop you from buying the sheet music singing or performing one of your favorite pop songs to yourself or even in public. But if you charge others to hear you perform it then you better cough up a fee to those who own the rights or get their permission. Amazon selling that reading performance as part of the package with the book. True it probably sounds worse than even my singing a pop song and may actually end up selling more audiobooks in reality. But the reading technology may improve to where it is comparable to a good storyteller. They feel the need to get the precedence down now if they can and I cannot blame them.
The op objects that they can’t get the reading out loud for what they paid to Amazon for the device. Is a performance of the book Amazon’s to sell with the book over the objections of those who own the rights?
BTW, Amazon had better label which books have the text to speech feature disabled so they are not bought with the customer thinking that they are getting something that they are not. It may turn out that it is in the authors’ best interests to enable to capacity if people are less likely to make the purchase with that feature disabled.
No one is preventing them from doing so. It’s already been distributed to me. They didn’t have to distribute it to me. Now that they have, if I want to read it to my nephew, take personal photos of it, or wipe my ass with it (not so fun with a chunk of plastic, but say it were a book), there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not selling recordings. I’m not photocopying each “page” of the Kindle and distributing those (although I see no problem with printing out an e-book so I can read it on paper). I’m not even sure that the Kindle allows me to distribute the e-book to a friend when I’m done reading it.
Or what Gorsnak said.
If she “performs” by reading from a book that is owned by the listener, what’s the problem?
But that’s irrelevant because the Kindle has no performances in it. It just allows me to take a copy of a book that I have already paid for, and consume it with my ears instead of my eyes, or with my fingers if the Kindle had a feature that converted text to scrolling braille.
A better analogy would be if I purchased a devise that could scan sheet music and have my piano play it for me. This would be sheet music that I purchased, and the devise coupled with the piano is only playing it for me. I could see the publishers having reasonable objections if I were making a public performance of it, but I’m not.
ETA: Forget the piano, just say it converts sheet music to notes that it pipes to speakers or headphones or something.
There are actually software packages that do this, more or less. I’m not aware of any that will actually read in scanned sheet music, but you can enter the notes manually and then play it back digitally. This would be comparable to buying a Kindle book, typing then words into a word processor on your computer, and then using text to speech software on your computer to play it back. So really, the only difference between what the Kindle 2 can do (and what the authors take issue with) and this hypothetical is that the Kindle 2 can read it back automatically, whereas in this hypothetical you’d have to take the time to type up the text.
The authors are, probably, concerned about this after looking at the whole file sharing issue with music. The implications of the Kindle are pretty simple. Authors make money on audio books. The Kindle feature does two things. First it takes the control of the work out of the authors hands and also will impact the authors revenue from audio books*.
In effect, the Kindle feature is the same as ‘Buy a book on the Kindle and you’ll the audio book free’.
As far as the performance issue goes, I’d imagine that this will play out in a similar way that player pianos did way back when with compulsory licensing. Link. Link 2 see section C
Slee
*Of course, there will be huge arguments about the revenue impact. One side arguing that there is no impact to authors, the other side arguing that it is a huge impact.
What? When buying an eBook, you’re buying the written text of a book in electronic format. What Amazon may or may not do with that text through special features of their reader device is WAY outside the purview of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Ruken I suggest you read slee’s very pertinent links.
slee, would it make a legal difference if the maker of the device and the seller of the electronic book were not one and the same?
Rysto, they are getting a cut of the sale of the printed word item via an electronic delivery system. Not of the performance of its being read which is a different item.
A bookseller can be given the rights to sell a copy of a play (or novel) without being given the rights to sell performances of the play (or novel). By selling both the device that creates the performance from the codes given to it, and the binary code that produces and reproduces it, they are selling that performance with the book.