The Kindle Swindle?

I'm sympathetic to the plight of the starving (or even well-fed) writer wanting to get paid for their work. But the opinion espoused in this piece is the classic argument that just because an industry has grown accustomed to a particular revenue stream or business model, they should therefore always and forever have the privilege of keeping it. And anyone who introduces products or technology to prevent that or cut into their revenue is not playing fair, morally questionable, and/or should have to compensate them for lost revenue.<p>It's a ridiculous argument.

You work for six months or a year building up your product, for no pay. A startup founder - or an unpublished author.<p>What most tech types don't realize is how much risk there is already in the writers profession. These are not fat-cat music executives. They don't have anything like as much chance of becoming rich as a founder of a startup. Heck, most don't even make a living, and have to keep the day job; even once they get published and get advances on later books. And if one book tanks, they're back to square one.<p>That's why they don't like change. They are already drowning in risk, and people are saying they should take on some more?<p>I don't buy the idea that text-to-speech is infringement, personally. But it's too easy to say that authors should just 'change their business model'. How?

<i>For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of "Goodnight Moon." If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.</i><p>I really don't follow his logic here. I think the fundamental question is "what is a performance?". I just find it hard to see that kindle reading = voice actor reading. Why go to the concert, when you've got a player piano? Is that really a threat?

There's a big disconnect here. Copyright controls <i>distribution</i>, not use. Amazon is distributing ebooks, the exact same ebooks as they were distributing 3 months ago. The only difference is, they now have a tool that consumes the book differently.<p>It's the equivalent of music visualization tools. When I play a CD in my Xbox and it shows me pretty lights, no one considers that copyright infringement. It's the exact same functionality as text-to-speech, but in reverse.

If I buy a book, I can freely record myself reading it. I then have an audio book. I <i>own</i> the book I bought, so recording myself (or anyone else) reading it is completely within my rights.<p>If I suddenly don't need to record myself, because technology reaches a point where a piece of software can read <i>my book</i> just as well as I can, then that's just the way it is.<p>If a temporary inconvenience creates a business opportunity for you, great. But you can't expect to hold onto that business once the inconvenience is gone.<p>The content industries need to understand that they can sell "a book" or "a movie", or "a song", but they can't sell music that only plays on certain devices, or DVDs that only play in certain continents, or books that you can read silently but not out loud. It's nonsense.

Text to speech is at best a 10% solution for the blind and those with impaired sight. The robotic voice that comes out of synthesizers is such a long way short of human cadence and intonation that the argument that the two compete is all but ludicrous for those in the know - i.e. those who have experience of both.<p>I can't take this guy seriously.

Old guard always wants to protect a dying business because the people in charge have to wipe out their existing knowledge and experience of their business to go into a new business. When he/she goes into the new business, he/she would have no advantages vs a competitor that already exists in the field (i.e. a print executive going into tech). Most companies (due to the promotion structure) cannot make this jump some can (Intel).<p>I think e-books give the best chance for print to survive as a medium (in e-ink form, not in paper form). But as always, the captain of the ship fades away, not unlike a frog being slowly boiled to death because the temperature is slowly increasing.

I think Blount is overestimating the capacities of text-to-speech technology. Sure, there may be speech synthesizers that can cough and say "umm" and do other human-cadence-like things, but I suspect that <i>inferring all those details of intonation from the normal punctuated text of a novel</i> is beyond the capacity of present technology, and may even be AI-complete.<p>If the digital files on the Kindle contained lots of metadata, added by a human editor, to assist the text-to-speech system, then Blount would have more of a case.

To the minimal extent auto-reading of ebooks competes with audiobooks, it also increases the value of those ebooks. The answer for Blount and the Author's Guild is to price the ebook reproduction rights properly -- not legally impair what ebook owners can do with their own books, on their own devices.

When this came up at the Kindle 2 release, I had hoped that the Author's Guild would listen to people's reactions as an indicator of things to come. Instead, they shout their argument twice as loud and in a more public place. Roy Blount has a choice, but he needs to make it soon.<p>The smart thing to do is restructure his industry following Apple's iTunes model, reducing the power of publishers and negotiating more favorable agreements between authors and ebook distributers.<p>The stupid thing is to become the next Lars Ulrich, telling people that they're pirates and technology is bad. He has a convenient corporate entity to attack, which is much easier than poor college kids, but he is fighting a futile battle against the tide.<p>Audio rights are an absurd right to begin with, existing because we drive around so much that some people are willing to splurge on this luxurious derivative. Technology naturally makes things less expensive, and if it isn't the Kindle, it will be another reader, or a reader add-on, that will provide the same functionality.<p>Do the right thing, Roy, and spend your time optimizing the efficiency of the market for authors.

So what do they want, should ebooks cost twice the price of normal books because they are both text and audiobooks now? I am sure doubling the price would increase the sales enormously, much to the pleasure of the authors.<p>Or maybe the system of having separate rights for all sorts of uses was crooked from the beginning.

They should be grateful that the Amazon Kindle, a complement good to ebooks is so popular. How many books were purchased because of the Amazon Kindle? How many books will be bought because of the extra usefulness of the audio feature? Instead, they are biting the hand that feeds them. Not only that, but they are also obstructing the advancement of technology and innovation by reducing their usefulness. First Google Books and now this. What a bunch of ungrateful bastards - hardly better than the RIAA.

I think the interesting bit here is whether the technology in the Kindle is actually infringing on the audio rights. It is a legal question that is going to need to define if the software generated voice is the same thing as an audio recording and therefore requires the same rights to distribute. I would think not as an audio recording exists when outside of software, and I assume the Kindle does this on the fly. But I am not a lawyer and all that, so who knows how this will play out.

I would still rather pay for an audiobook read by a person if I really wanted it. A human voice can still convey a lot more emotion than any current technology.

Am I right in thinking that there's a potential opportunity for Amazon here? If they provide audio playback support for the Kindle they could sell combined Audio/eBooks that maybe even highlight the spoken text and turn in time to the audio?<p>I think this could be good for both audio books and ebooks as well as when considering the implications for educational books (such as language books or religious study materials).

If you want to see what the Kindle 2 text-to-speech sounds like, you can checkout this video <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9UtONUBV0s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9UtONUBV0s</a> (at the 4:05 mark)<p>The unboxing video is really annoying but I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the text-to-speech. The voice even has intonation which I've never heard in automated speech before.

For a text-to-speech system to be as good as the standard audiobook, it would require the software actually understand the material and give each line the correct emotion and cadence it deserves. I find that words spoken at monotone or at a pace inappropriate to the content go right through me.<p>The audiobook is a performance and as a performance, deserves additional rights and royalties.

It seems funny to me that he chose to discuss the technology behind the voice synthesis as that seems to weaken his argument. It is clear that the audio experience (the effects to make it sound like a human voice) is largely a result of the technology and the copyrighted material is still being used only in text form

He is ridiculous. I can do anything legal with the purchased file, that's my basic right as a customer.

By this logic, I have to pay royalties if I hire someone to read a book out loud to me.