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

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.)

Comments

Re:Let's do a reality check

[Wooky_linuxer]

According to the Authors Guild logic, if I read aloud a book to my 4 y.o. son, I should pay another license.

Nah, just kidding. I don't have a son.

public v private

[bugs2squash]

I don't get why I cant use the content I have purchased for personal use in any way I want to so long as I use it personally or among my small group of friends, just as I might read a book to my son at bed time (or is that illegal now ?).
I get that there should be an extra payment (and have made such license payments) if I want to display a DVD publicly, because a bunch of other people might not buy the movie if they can just go see it projected by me.
I have yet to see why Kindle reading a book takes bread from the mouths of authors and I don't see why celebrity audio-book readers should feel that they have any god-given monopoly on reading books aloud.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[ximenes]

Why should Amazon increase the fee when the publisher and author are not adding any value? Rather Amazon has added the value here at their own expense.

By having TTS capabilities, they have not eliminated the audiobook market but have combined the regular market with the audiobook market into one cohesive (e-book) market. This may reduce redundant sales (when someone buys multiple formats of the same basic product), but may also prevent market inefficiencies such as a person desiring one version of the product but not being able to find it due to stocking issues.

As it stands with regular books, a given person may have to buy the same basic product twice in order to have it in both a written and audio form. This may be worth it because the audiobook form has a special value above and beyond the book version, but fundamentally they are paying twice for the basic content. By enhancing the book, the publisher gets to charge more and this is the financial incentive to undertake the work. The only reason why they are able to charge more is because of the scarcity of the ability to create this product; most people do not have recording studios and access to persons with good speaking voices.

The Kindle (and similar technology) has removed that scarcity, and so the need to produce audiobooks will decline. However, it seems unlikely that it will entirely disappear, as there will be a difference between artificial and natural readers for some time to come.

Just because you were able to successfully exploit market demands for a while doesn't mean that you should be able to do forever regardless of technological progress. Should automobiles have a built-in horse whip tax in order to keep that industry afloat?

Here's your reality check

[goombah99]

Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market, and authors should be compensated in some way...

This is only true if you assume that there are people out there who would buy both the eBook AND the audio book if there was no TTS. Otherwise eBook sales aren't causing a loss of sales in the audio book market, they are merely replacing those sales.

I own a few books as audio books (usually bought before a long drive somewhere), and even in the cases of the really good ones, I've never felt a burning desire to buy the book again in print.

E-books sell for less than half to a quarter of audio book CD prices and fewer copies are sold. the ratio is enormous-- the Audio book market is 1000 times larger than the e-book market.

hence replacing 1-for-1 an audiobook with an e-book would cut the income by 1/2 or 1/4. Moreover if the author reads his own book, then his roylaties are even higher so the loss is maginified further.

you might wonder why then a publisher would be willing to sell if it represents a loss of revenue. The answer is that the e-book publisher and the audio book publisher are not the same person. the audio book publisher might be horrified that his sales are canialized by cheap e-baook sales, but from the e-book publisher's point of view it's a chance to expand their market 100 fold.

Re:not crazy, auditioning for a job w/ RIAA

[Gerzel]

Try reading the article before you judge. After reading I am more suspect that these posts are being put up by those who are more pro-Amazon looking for a sympathetic crowd.

Mr. Blunt is NOT ranting. He actually does put forth a good argument that authors should be paid for the audio rights for their books if an audio production is being sold by a third party.

There ALREADY are legal exceptions for the blind to produce and distribute free audio versions of texts, and btw the kindle uses on-screen controls that no blind person could operate in order to access the audio functions, currently.

Amazon is indeed advertising these products as an audio book(the rights of which are worth far more currently than the rights for an e-book) and an e-book in one w/o paying for the rights to sell an audio book.

The audio functions of the books are coming closer to human levels and are being marketed and sold as such.

Remember while copyright laws have been abused and in many cases are abusive and extreme in their extent; still, for every exec and RIAA stooge getting paid hand over fist there are ten creative writers and authors who make an honest living using those laws as well.

Fight the abuse and the abusers, not the people who are using Copyright as it was intended, which still despite what you might hear is the vast majority of copyright users and creative workers.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[Red Flayer]

Emphasis mine:

Thus the real statement of the quesiton is this: if the manufacturing cost of books and audio books goes down then clearly the price of these should fall. But since audo books and e-books have different roylaty rates, if you change their ratio then you chance the total earnings to the authors. thus you need to re-adjust the roylaty rates so that the authors get the same total earnings.

This is false. If this were an ideal free market, it would be true -- but the fact of the matter is that there are barriers to entry, incomplete information, and most importantly, works of art/literature are NOT a commodity good.

Regardless of the the cost to produce the good (author + publisher), the price is determined by the seller, and will only loosely follow marginal cost if there is ample competition.

In short, this has little to do with economics, other than the fact the e-books compete with audiobooks, and more to do with terms of licensing of a copyrighted work.