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Authors Guild President Wants To End Royalty-Free TTS On Kindle

Posted by timothy on from the is-it-just-me-or-does-guild-sound-medieval? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The president of the Authors Guild has launched a rant in the NY Times about how the Kindle 2 provides Text-to-Speech capabilities that, oh the horror, allow the user to have any text on the Kindle read to her. Roy Blunt, Jr. moans that this is copyright infringement of audio books, and that Kindle users should be forced to pay royalties on audio even though they've already paid for the text version of a book! Amazingly he harps on about how TTS technology has become so good that it may replace humans — and then uses this to argue that it's unfair for Kindle to provide TTS! I think the Authors Guild need a new president — someone less of a Luddite, and more familiar with copyright law." (See also the Guild's executive director's similar claims that reading aloud, royalty-free, is an illegal function of software.)

2 of 539 comments (clear)

  1. I own one by blueforce · · Score: 5, Informative

    I got my Kindle 2.0 from the UPS driver yesterday.

    I tried out this frightful technology and I can tell you - it sounds very much like Stephen Hawking reading to me.

    If by "replace humans" he means Stephen Hawking doing book readings at the local Borders well then, yes, maybe he's right.

    On the _other_ hand, I'd like my books read to me... "Once more, with feeling" (you dirty grubs).

    --
    If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
  2. Re:Advocacy organizations by JustinOpinion · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're right that the Authors Guild relies on members. Which is precisely why, if you disagree with the statements of the Guild, you should put pressure on authors, either by boycotting any author who is a member of the Guild, or writing to them and asking them to signal their disapproval.

    When the Authors Guild says these kinds of ridiculous things (and uses logic which, incidentally, implies that people with disabilities should not be allowed to convert media to a form they can use), it makes all members look like greedy idiots. Authors should speak up and tell the Guild that they do not want to be represented as such.

    For a partial list of Guild members, see:

    http://www.authorsguild.org/news/member_websites/a.html

    Contacting the Guild and mentioning that you plan to boycott authors associated with them might also get the message across.