Well, I see The Barn House is finally available on the Kindle. I don’t know how long it’s been available, just that it wasn’t last time I looked. How come you didn’t tell us, Ed?
Of course, the paperback is available for almost half the price right now, and . . . Grrrrr! No text-to-speech! Damn you Penguin! Can you do anything about this Ed? Probably not, I know, but it really irks me. Seems to be more and more the trend for publishers.
I said I’d read the book when it came out on Kindle, but so far I’ve avoided buying anything with TTS disabled. Guess I’ll wait and see. Do let us know if that gets changed, because I’ll definitely buy it then.
What, you think they notify authors? They tell me things when they want me to sign something. The other day they sent me a contract amendment authorizing digital editions of KNOW IT ALL.
I was absolutely thrilled when my twenty-years-younger baby sister told me that one of her favorite books is KNOW IT ALL. She’s almost old enough to handle the full majesty of Cecil’s wisdom, but at this point I’m afraid it might still scar her for life (much as it did me at about the same age!) Or get me cut from from her by our parents. But soon. Yes, soon. [evil cackle]
On topic, it’s probably too late for Barn House, since you weren’t even notified. (Presumably the digital rights were bundled with the publishing rights in the original contract.) When you get a contract amendment, however, do you have any way of forcing them to allow text-to-speech?
When Random House first started blocking it, they claimed that they would allow it if the author requested it, but I’ve heard that’s not the case. It seems strange that an author could have no legal way of allowing text-to-speech if the digital and/or audio rights still reside with the author. (Though I guess if they have both they could just self publish a Kindle edition.)
I don’t have a way of forcing them to do much of anything. What’s the deal with text-to-speech? You want to use a Kurzweil reader or whatever they have nowadays and they say you can’t? Not sure what the issue is here.
When Amazon launched the 2nd gen Kindle, one of the big features was it’s ability to read text to you out loud. This is obviously a big benefit to visually disabled people, who wouldn’t have to use a seperate reader, and also to people with other disabilities (for example, someone with trouble holding a book or pressing buttons, since it will turn the pages automatically as it reads).
It also turned out to be surprisingly helpful for non-disabled people. It means I don’t have to stop reading if I’m doing something with my hands or even driving in the car. I used it a lot more than I thought I would. (It’s a pretty high-quality speech engine. I probably wouldn’t listen to a whole novel that way, but it’s great for a chapter or two.)
Unfortunately, Amazon didn’t bother to run this feature past the publishers–not too surprisingly, since TTS has been available in various forms and with a variety of platforms for quite some time with no controversy. But the Authors Guild and several publishers protested to Amazon that this was an infringement of the audio rights and even claimed that it qualified as a “public performance” of the work. No one seems to think there was any legal merit to the arguments, but since Amazon relies on a good relationship with the publishers and wanted them to make more books available in Kindle format, they caved and allowed publishers to block Text-to-Speech.
Random House was the first to do so, but claimed that they were doing so to protect the authors and would allow authors to unblock TTS if they wished. This was aparently untrue, since all books published by RH or any of its imprints currently have TTS blocked, and I’ve heard that authors trying to get it unblocked on their works have been unsuccesful.
So far three other publishers have followed suit, so four of the six major publishers have blocked TTS on all of their books. There have been protests from some organizations for the blind and disabled, but they haven’t gotten much traction.
ETA: If you look on the Amazon page for the Kindle edition of Barn House you can see the line “Text-to-speech: not enabled” under the price. NAL is part of Penguin, which is one of the publisher to start blocking recently.
AFAIK there is no audiobook for The Barn House. And if there were, it would likely cost significantly more and wouldn’t really be what I want. I don’t want to listen to a whole audiobook of The Barn House, I like being able to switch back and forth between listening and reading.