The Kindle Swindle?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html?_r=1

by edgefield • 17 years ago

35 61 17 years ago

gojomo• 17 years ago

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.

helium• 17 years ago

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.

witten2• 17 years ago

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.

It's a ridiculous argument.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Also, isn't reading on a kindle also like a movie? At least when you scroll, the text is moving across the screen. So I think Amazon should also pay for the movie rights.

Retric• 17 years ago

I don't think the refresh rate is fast enough to "scroll".

sethg2• 17 years ago

This is not his argument.

Separate revenue streams for audio books is not just a quaint custom in the publishing world, but a consequence of copyright law, which treats text and audio rights as properties that may be licensed separately. He's arguing that his constituents' property is being taken from them without their consent. I think his case is weak, but it's not dumb.

brlewis• 17 years ago

More precisely it treats text and audio as distinct works which must be licensed individually. I wrote a lot about this at http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2009-02-11

wavesplash• 17 years ago

There isn't an 'audio right' in copyright law. The author is trying to justify the loss of an established contractual norm for a sold derivative work (a professionally produced reading) by expanding the notion of copyright. The author is confusing contract rights with copyright. http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html

jpd• 17 years ago

But Amazon is neither selling nor giving away audio books. They are giving away a general text-to-speech solution which may conveniently be used on a book. Arguing that this is violating copyrights is the same thing as saying that text-to-speech is inherently illegal.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

I think his case is weak, but it's not dumb.

I don't understand what the Author's Guild is trying to do here... Obviously, Amazon's lawyers have considered what the implications of an text-to-speech service are. As far as I can tell, the AG isn't even filing a lawsuit, just a PR complain-campaign. What does that get them?

Conspiracy-hat-interpretation: this is great PR for the Kindle's new text-to-speech features. If it wasn't for the Author's Guild, this would be just another bullet point on the features list. Is this a favor from Roy Blount to Amazon?

greyman2• 17 years ago

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

witten2• 17 years ago

Even with Amazon's DRM?

herval• 17 years ago

your basic right as a customer is doing anything that the usage agreement of your product allows. You can't buy a CD, for instance, and play it in a show (at least not in most countries, since this can be defined as profiting from that profit, and you didn't buy that right when you bought the CD). You can't also play a DVD in an oil rig, school bus or any other public place (that's on the DVD agreement, right there when you turn it on). And if having your book reproduced as audio offends the 'Book Guild agreement', then you probably can't do it 'legally'. Ouch.

Yes, that's ridiculous - but that's as far as your 'basic rights' go...

eli• 17 years ago

No you can't. Maybe that's the way it should be, but you certainly can't read that book to an audience or crack the DRM and print out copies for your friends.

greyman2• 17 years ago

I know, but I wrote "anything legal". Reading the book to an audience might not be legal, but running it through the reading software at my home certainly is not illegal.

jhickner• 17 years ago

If I buy a book, I can freely record myself reading it. I then have an audio book. I own the book I bought, so recording myself (or anyone else) reading it is completely within my rights.

If I suddenly don't need to record myself, because technology reaches a point where a piece of software can read my book just as well as I can, then that's just the way it is.

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.

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.

tptacek• 17 years ago

You cannot redistribute the audio recording you created of yourself reading the book.

inklesspen• 17 years ago

And you cannot redistribute the audio recording the Kindle makes on the fly.

No audio book is being distributed by Amazon. An ebook is being distributed by Amazon.

barbie17• 17 years ago

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.

unalone8• 17 years ago

Perhaps I'm biased because I'm a writer myself, but I think they're a little bit more excusable than the RIAA. Writers have an ancient history: as a group they are further behind the times than any other, and their world is extremely closed-door and high-barrier. Because of that, their love and joy has dwindled, decade by decade, and they haven't noticed that the people who are making their craft more loved are the people who are embracing the future (Billy Collins, former poet laureate, for instance).

The effect is that you have something akin to a group of old, uninformed, frightened people, who are all very bright but very ignorant regarding some things, and some of those people think technology means books have to die, and if that was the case then they'd be right in that something powerful and valuable was being lost. So I understand why they're so fearful, even if I wish they could comprehend how things have been moving forward.

wmeredith• 17 years ago

Since when is ignorance an excuse to inflict harm?

The established players seek to maintain the status quo in which they exist as "established." This leads them to fight change. I for one, hope they lose that fight, but it's only because I'm not one of those established in this fight, so I will benefit from progressive methods to access media.

It's also worth mentioning that you'll find very few undiscovered/unpublished writers that would have a problem with someone buying their book and listening to it on a Kindle.

RK• 17 years ago

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 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?

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

Do read about what the music industry of the early 1900s had to say about the player piano:

http://www.eetimes.com/disruption/essays/vonlohmann.jhtml

rationalbeaver• 17 years ago

It seems that Amazon would agree with that assessment, since they own Audible.com, the web's biggest audio book seller. One would imagine that if they thought the kindle's reading feature would infringe upon/destroy the audio book business, they wouldn't have given it the green light.

sethbc• 17 years ago

Agreed. In fact, Amazon engineered the Kindle to play Audible books as well. And they didn't eliminate this functionality when they added the ability to 'read' the books aloud.

unalone8• 17 years ago

He sounds like somebody who doesn't fundamentally understand the nature of audio reading. He's envisioning something more threatening to audio readers than actually exist today.

barrkel• 17 years ago

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.

I can't take this guy seriously.

Harkins• 17 years ago

They're getting much better, check out http://www.ivona.com/online/editor.php?set_lang=en

I can tell it's generated, but there are bits here and there that sound like a normal speaking voice. This is like CGI in the 90s, where everyone was talking about how it was wooden and clunky and awful but the proponents just kept building better tools and now teenagers can make lightsaber duels with their laptops.

_b8r0• 17 years ago

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?

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).

Tichy3• 17 years ago

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.

Or maybe the system of having separate rights for all sorts of uses was crooked from the beginning.

jaspertheghost2• 17 years ago

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).

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.

unalone8• 17 years ago

Why not in paper form?

There's something lost from paper to e-ink, and everybody who uses a Kindle will realize that. If e-books become big and cheap, that means book sales are going to benefit, to some degree.

jaspertheghost2• 17 years ago

I personally read a lot and I think the electronic medium will add an additional layer of value: annotation, collaboration, access to a large amount of knowledge without having to lug around paper. Print's slowly dying because it's not linked to rest of the content in the world.

I don't think content creators are dead by any means, but I do think there have to be devices and mediums that enable more than the create and publish model.

When Amazon designed Kindle, they tried to make sure the user experience was as close to a book as possible. When I go on a plane, I would prefer not lugging around 4 books in my suitcase vs just using a Kindle. There is something about the print medium that's very pleasing, but I think e-ink and e-books will co-exist like theater and t.v. Although many can say that the T.V. will cannabilze all theater going activity, there is something unique about the experience that the solo activity cannot capture.

sethg2• 17 years ago

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 inferring all those details of intonation from the normal punctuated text of a novel is beyond the capacity of present technology, and may even be AI-complete.

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.

mrkurt• 17 years ago

There's a big disconnect here. Copyright controls distribution, 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.

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.

ajb3• 17 years ago

You work for six months or a year building up your product, for no pay. A startup founder - or an unpublished author.

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.

That's why they don't like change. They are already drowning in risk, and people are saying they should take on some more?

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?

jbrun• 17 years ago

"They don't have anything like as much chance of becoming rich as a founder of a startup."

Have you ever looked at the revenues for a best selling author? They very much a have a small chance of hitting it big. They should change their business model by offering interesting things like McSweeney's which uses both online and offline products to attract an audience.

ajb3• 17 years ago

Yes, they have a small chance of hitting it big. But I reckon it's a much smaller chance than that of a startup founder.

unalone8• 17 years ago

McSweeney's is an icky model. They work online, but they're very closed-door, they appreciate only a very specific manner of writing, and they don't tell writers what it is they're doing wrong when they are, in fact, doing something wrong.

unalone8• 17 years ago

Hey! This is what my start-up does, so I can talk about that a little bit.

The first thing to change about the business model is the focus. A lot of people who are enthusiastic about writers know two or three names of writers they follow, and that's it. Everything outside of that is an unknown to them. The first part of the solution is to focus people who are enthusiastic about writing in one place.

The next fix is to let writers release fast, iterate often, similar to hackers, and that means critique. You need to give them a good system for getting lots of feedback fast. The minute they start writing they should have access to feedback, even if they choose to finish a first draft before releasing anything and showing it to people. The better your revision access is, the less of a risk it is.

The final solution is to publish more writers, more incrementally. It means that you sift through a lot of short stories and poems and yes, even novels, if you're a publishing company, and you get back to everybody so that they can figure out how to get better. At the same time, you expand aggressively so that you can handle the incoming people as your model expands outward, and you keep the focus on quality publishing, just more of it.

Also, computer-based vocalization is horrible, and it will never replace audiobooks. I want Steven Colbert reading to me, not my Kindle.

ajb3• 17 years ago

Those sound like the right goals, if you have a way to implement them.

Does your startup have a website yet?

katz• 17 years ago

Journalism faces almost the same obstacle. The current business model is not working any more and there are no alternatives.

I have not bought a single newspaper this year - and I have not even looked at online advertisements on newspaper websites.

I think the newspaper industry is going to largely collapse and it is going to burn everyone (worse reporting, no more investigative reporting, etc....)

DenisM• 17 years ago

How about "I don't care?". Really. I bought the book and I am free to do with it as I please. That's where you rights as an author stop and mine as a reader begin. Will we have fewer authors? Likely. But I don't care. For all I know there are too many books being written already.

To put it another way, should we also charge each parent who reads a book to his child? It would make current authors more prosperous, but then it will also attract more people to writing and those new people will be just as miserable as the current crop is today. There will always be some miserable writers, no matter where the goal posts are set.

Can't make a living writing? Don't write. Go do something people would want.

far33d• 17 years ago

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.

The audiobook is a performance and as a performance, deserves additional rights and royalties.

jeffesp• 17 years ago

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.

ajaypopat• 17 years ago

If you want to see what the Kindle 2 text-to-speech sounds like, you can checkout this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9UtONUBV0s (at the 4:05 mark)

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.

ynniv• 17 years ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do the right thing, Roy, and spend your time optimizing the efficiency of the market for authors.

subhash• 17 years ago

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

uzimonkey• 17 years ago

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

The Kindle Swindle?

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