Swirls of controversy surround the Amazon ebook reader Kindle 2's text-to-speech synthesis feature. Except, most of this brouhaha is generated by Slashdot's army of Amazon-is-always-right footsoldiers led by Technology-can-do-no-wrong weekend warriors.
Most, if not all, miss this part of the argument--it isn't the publishers versus Amazon at all! It's the content producers versus the content distributors.
I'm going to leave the issue of whether a computer-generated audio rendering of a text is a "derivative work" to the lawyers. I'm instead going to focus on the point of view of the actual content creators (also known as authors).
Audio books make up a huge portion of the book market and that market share is growing multiplicatively year-over-year. But ebooks represent a sliver of the overall market. Mix the ability to generate an audio book on-the-fly with the pittance given to an author for her ebook with the time and effort it takes dozens of people to generate a legitimate audio book (let alone the original text, which can take decades), and you have theft.
Here's another slant (yes, slant(!)) that misses the point: ebooks are not plain-text books--they are DRM-encoded derivative works created by the publishers for a sliver of the cost of production, marketing, and distribution combined, and authors, in fact, do not get paid in full--authors get what's known as, yes, shutdown, it's called royalties.
As for the followup post's argument that the author gets the copyright holder's rights, I can only say the following: anyone, no matter how absolutely perfect the manuscript, who submits it to a publisher with a copyright attached, will be laughed out of the business. Copyright attaches, in publishing, upon the agreement to publish, and it is held not by the author but by the publisher.
I recommend reading the Engadget Interview with Authors' Guild Exec. Director Paul Aiken to the legion on Slashdot who have no better ability to debate than to toss around the tired 'STFU' meme.
In other Kindle-related paranoia, Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate that the device is going to make Amazon the ebook equivalent of Apple's iTunes Store in its market dominance. He couldn't have missed the point farther. Total 180 from reality.
Will the Kindle increase sales of eBooks? We'll see. Will it lock the entire publishing industry into a DRM tarpit and sink it? No.
Here's why. Every industry learned from what the iTunes DRM system did to music vis a vis piracy. Every industry learned it well. Are publishers, the most change-wary of all, going to allow themselves to be handcuffed by a DRM scheme they themselves can't control? Get serious.
In the mean time?
Oh, I don't know, read a book?
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I think you may be kindling an argument where not much of one exists. It's tough to take on an entire industry unless you're one of a group of mega-authors -- say, Clancy, Patterson, Turow and others of their ilk and readership got together and demanded that things change. Either they'd be prosecuted for an antitrust violation, or they'd get a larger share of the royalties. But unsung authors don't have a chance.
ReplyDeleteHmm. I don't know much about the cutting edge of text-to-speech programs, but I'm thinking on-the-fly audiobook generation is going to be nowhere near professional quality for a very long time. Hell, if it's anything like YouTube's comment read-back feature, I don't think I could tolerate more than a few minutes of it at a time. It seems as if you'd need an enormous library of samples and a ludicrously complex program to choose them properly to even come close to mimicking the fluidity of human speech. Example: as a security measure for this very blog comment, the user needs to read words from a image and manually retype them. If a program hasn't yet been designed to interpret words from a picture, I think that listenable text-to-speech programs are still far off. (Feel free to correct me on this if I'm wrong; I have only the vaguest notions of actual computer programming methods.)
ReplyDeleteI'm more concerned with the fact that publishers are cutting costs with the ebook format and not passing the benefits along to authors. If the Kindle doesn't catch on in the mainstream, this will all come to naught. Ideally, though, this could allow authors to publish directly, since it seems like it'd be simple to convert an existing digital document into an ebook format.
Interesting point. But if the hype about the Kindle 2 is to be ever so slightly believed, then they've something closer to the speech generator fluency for Stephen Hawking with various 'voices,' all based on real people reading massive amounts of text to give it the samples.
ReplyDeleteAs for what the publishers are doing, authors are already being shafted when it comes to republication rights, audio-book rights, etc., etc., etc., so why should this be any different.
Personally, from a tecnologist's standpoint, I give the Kindle 2 a 1% chance of getting off the ground. Then again, if you've been on Amazon lately, they have a feature (mis-feature, actually) on *every* product (that's why this is funny) to recommend a product for the Kindle. Including Movies! I checked for various things. It's actually fun, recommending Refrigerators and Weed-whackers to be available for the Kindle...
As I said, it is a *mis*-feature.
Then again, it would be funny to have the thing reading W. Juliet aloud to you in the middle of Penn. Station... (see next post)