Authors slam reading aloud ebooks

While I like authors and am occasionally skeptical of ebook readers, the Authors Guild's slam against the Amazon Kindle 2 confuses the heck out of me.

One of the features of the upgraded Kindle is that it can read a book out loud to you, using a canned computerized voice similar to the text to speech systems available on many current computers.

Upon hearing of this, the Authors Guild told the Wall Street Journal "They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Faced with pushback (including the suggestion that perhaps the Authors Guild would like to ban all reading aloud of books), the Guild retrenched, suggesting that publishers should consider forcing Amazon to add restrictions to books that could block access to the read-aloud feature.

This is absurd. Book owners can buy paperback books, and rebind them into hardcovers; companies like Brodart sell this service to libraries. It's as if the Authors Guild was trying to put Brodart out of business, claiming that rebinding paperbacks would infringe on their exclusive rights to sell hardcover rights.

There's been a lot written about this, but my favorite is Neil Gaiman's take.

"When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it."

Comments

[Peter Reynolds]

Re: Brodart changing binding for libraries

Over here in UK many books have this notice:
"This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser."

[Wayne Somers]

Your reaction seems to me to display what I would least expect from you: naivete about technology. The "canned computerized sound" these things have now will be replaced by better and better sound, but if the authors don't protest now, they will lose an asset that has been covered by negotiated contracts. The vast majority of authors make pathetically little for their hard work, and booksellers have historically been shamefully indifferent to copyright issues.

[prying1]

Neil Gaiman's take is really sad. Apples and oranges and a red herring thrown in to boot. There is a difference between reading to a child and selling a book over the counter.

If that same book was sold in a package with both print and audio tapes it would cost more and the author would receive payment for both as if sold separately UNLESS there was a contractual agreement that said otherwise.

If you record yourself reading a book and send it to a girlfriend that is one thing. If she duplicates it and sells it on eBay that is another. The new Kindle allows books to be sold over the counter as a print and audio book and the authors are left with only half payment.

Paul Aitken's point, "They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law." is true. "They" being companies that are selling both Audio and Print copies of copyrighted material in a single package. To take his statement and abuse it, saying he is against people reading books out loud, does a disservice to common sense.

We shall see what the courts decide.

[jason]

This is so dumb. One of the key components of any audio version of a book, is who reads it and how. A generic computer voice counts for nothing. No more than the text on the page. A generic computer voice will not compete with a properly produced production, and will not affect their audio market. Plus there are many books that people might like to listen for which will audio versions will never be produced: such as most non-fiction books.

I can't tell you how happy it made when I found out about the read aloud function, it would fundamentally change the life of my dyslexic girlfriend.

[jason]

Fuck it, charge an extra euro for the version with read aloud switched on.... They'll get more cash for doing nothing. (Producing audio books is pretty expensive).

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