Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
I wrote earlier about the warning made by the Authors Guild to its members over the Kindle 2’s Read-to Me feature. In Wednesday’s New York Times, Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Guild makes no bones about it, calling it “The Kindle Swindle.”
The concerns of the Author’s Guild around the Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature center around the fact that while Amazon.com pays pays royalties to the authors and publishers, but not for audio rights.
He says:
Amazon sells these downloads, and where the books are under copyright, it pays royalties to the authors and publishers.
Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there’s another thing about Kindle 2 — its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.
True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.
Now, here’s my take on this. I don’t believe the text-to-speech functionality of the Kindle 2 is anywhere near as good as listening to a actual human read, and emote, a book. Ah, but Blount addresses that as well.
You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading “Harry Potter†or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.)
I don’t know where he gets the idea that it is “quite listenable.” I mean, you can listen to it, but it doesn’t compare to hearing a real audiobook. Right now, I would call this a non-issue (and it sounds like a double-dip; trying to get paid twice for the same thing).
On the other hand, as I wrote in my prior article, as robotic, electronically-generated voices are become more and more human-like (Star Trek: TNG, anyone?) he might actually have a point. But even then, many users of the Kindle 10 or whatever it will be called might never use the text-to-speech functionality.
This is something to be address, perhaps someday, but it’s certainly not something to call a swindle.
I see it in two ways, from the perspective of Blount:
1) People will often take a poor quality free thing over a quality costly thing, even if the costly thing isn’t overpriced. This is not a problem if both are being offered by the same person (such as Radiohead’s mp3 experiment). But it *is* an issue when it’s two different people or entities.
2) It’s going to become a problem. It isn’t one now, but by the time it *is* an issue, it will be too late to save authors from being swindled. And I don’t think they’re trying to get paid twice for the same thing. I think in an ideal world, you would buy a book package, which would be a physical book and an ebook and an audio book all together. But that isn’t how it works. As long as audio books are sold separately, the author should be paid royalties for any for-profit “audio book” thing. And that’s what the text2speech function is basically being marketed as.
Seems to me that the Kindle is for reading, not listening. Why would anyone pay $359 to be read to in a mechanical monotone when real audio books are available for a number of other devices at a lower price? Is it a numbers of available titles thing? The read aloud thing seems to be a contrived feature, like a digital clock on an electric can opener.
I would say, Lewie, that a more fair comparison would be….an mp3 player on a phone…hmm, what a silly feature! No one will care about that!
Point taken, Kunoichi. Still, if your mp3 sounded like a Kindle… well.