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Amazon Caves On Kindle 2 Text-To-Speech
On Wednesday we discussed news that the Authors Guild had objected to the text-to-speech function on Amazon's Kindle 2, claiming that it infringed on audio book copyright. Today, Amazon said that while the feature is legally sound, they would be willing to disable text-to-speech on a title-by-title basis at the rightsholder's request. "We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is."
considering that this thing is running linux, I'm going to just set my timer and see how long it is before /. is posting a story that the TTS feature has been opened up to any book.
Which title would you buy, one that has the text 2 speech or one that doesn't? Seems like this is a value add, and any publisher would be loosing out by asking Amazon to withhold kindle.
So, Amazon in a sense wins, because I'm willing to bet most titles will end up with text 2 speech anyways.
Then again, some people buy operating systems when there are perfectly good operating systems available for free. So what do I know?
So you can't "buy" the title, can't sell it or loan it out, can't give it away, and now they can control precisely how you consume it. Is it any wonder why devices like this are doomed to fail when it comes to the mass market. People aren't complete stupid.
Even if the encryption algorithm and hardware were "unhackable", how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired????
Have a Kindle title which you want TTS (and it was forbidden)? Just convert it to regular text, as above, and poof, TTS.
Unless Amazon is going to start checking the files you TTS/read on your Kindle for copyright violations, I suppose.
Why am I cheering about what seems to be a complete breakdown of what geeks want?
Simple - for most books, the "rightsholder" is the AUTHOR, not the publisher. (This is the opposite situation from the music industry.)
So authors will need to contact Amazon to disable this, and I'm betting that generally they won't bother. If the book publishers tell Amazon to do it, Amazon can just point out that the copyright is not in their control.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Although seriously questionable legally, if the authors guild was able to prove that Text-To-Speech of copyright books was copyright infringement then that would be absolutely huge.
Tons of disabled people already depend on text-to-speech and with an ever older populace this is only going to become even more important to everyone.
Plus, where does the copyright end? If someone makes a book reference in public will they get their butt sued? Or will we have to get a public display licence to have a conversation now?
Ultimately Amazon shouldn't concede on this. In fact I want this to be legally tested and put to rest asap.
All of them, now that they know they can charge extra for it. But honestly, how many people want Stephen King to sound like Steven Hawking ?
Copyright does not give the property holder the right to tell users what color/brand glasses they are allowed to wear when reading a particular title and this is really no different. Amazon/Kindle should stick to their guns and let the end user decide to turn on the TTS engine or not. Besides, most people can read a lot faster than even the fastest discernible speech.
This would be that sort of thing without any special version thereof.
The big deal here was that it was cutting out another revenue stream (which was more per unit than the books were...) and cutting out the pay to the person doing the book reading. Unfortunately, not all books are converted to audio. Most are not, actually.
Now, if Kindle can do audio books, it's sort of fine- but it's going to be an overpriced media player that one could accomplish this limited result with a smaller, cheaper device. The thing that made the Kindle even more special is that you didn't NEED someone to read out a book into audio format, it was going to open up a larger space up for the blind. That is now up in the air that there will be any such thing.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Amazon could easily disable TTS in an un-hackable way. Assuming these books are PDFs, Amazon could replace every other word with a picture of that word; it would look identical to the original, but would kill TTS. I do not know the hardware specification of Kindle, but I assume it has enough storage space for that and that OCR would be tough on its CPU.
Personally, I would demand lower prices for TTS-disabled books. I should not be paying the same amount that I would for a non-disabled book, and I certainly should be paying more for a book that is not disabled. Maybe I'll just go back to reading books from Project Gutenberg until this all settles down...
Palm trees and 8
This may be flame bait, but does anyone else really not care about this DRM laden device? I feel like people here generally agree that the DMCA, DRM, RIAA, and a lot of other acronyms are bad, however, the Kindle seems to break the rules and suddenly be cool? When someone jailbreaks it and allows the use of admittedly nice looking display without being tied to Amazon's DRM I will be interested. Until then, stop, please.
Tons of disabled people already depend on text-to-speech and with an ever older populace this is only going to become even more important to everyone.
People with disabilities can use specialized devices, which are made available only by prescription to people with a qualifying disability, that play copies of works produced under an exception to the U.S. copyright statute (17 USC 121). Kindle 2, being available to all, does not meet this requirement.
I need more coffee, I spelled Stephen Hawking wrong..... Dont worry, I have already taken the appropriate amount of points off my geek card.
And will there be an override for people with disabilities?
No, because they use something other than Kindle.
Publishers won't be makin' a penny offa me for this "added value" anyway... I have to subvocalize when I read, so I wouldn't want to hear anyone but the voices already inside my head. Ooops, gotta go, one of them wants something....
>>>many people want Stephen King to sound like Steven Hawking ?
I've never heard King read any of his books, but I have heard Toni Morrison. In that case, the robotic voice would be an improvement. Toni reads her books as if she's taking downers. That's a flaw lots of authors have; they may be great writers but their speech leaves a lot to be desired. Give me Hawking instead.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Although I find it abhorrent from a copyright law perspective, this might have been a very clever move by Amazon. These rights holders who can't make money legitimately have been going around trying to make money by making extortionate threats. Amazon just removed that card from the Authors Guild's hand. I wonder how the authors -- who are supposed to be served by the Authors Guild -- feel about it. Kindle and Kindle 2 were 2 of the best things that have happened to authors; nice to alienate Amazon.
I wonder how many of the authors will now 'opt out' of the text-to-speech feature. I'm guessing: none.
Amazon showed this threat for what it was: extortion.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
It's like the iPod. All the Apple fanboys loved Steve for putting the DRM and vendor lock-in into a pretty velvet glove--and of coursed blamed it on the evil record companies. The Amazon fans are doing the same thing with the Kindle and the publishers. I personally would feel like a moron to pay nearly the same price as for a paper copy of a book (which I can resell, give away, or do whatever else I see fit with) as for a digital restrictions laden electronic copy tethered to one device.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
The issue i much bigger than just the blind. Both the MacOS and many versions of Linux have screen readers for the blind as part of the OS and there are similar products for sale or download for Windows.
These screen readers can be activated and used by anyone, not just the blind. So is this technology illegal? Should the users of such be required to prove they are disabled before it can be activated on their computers?
While the voices on the Kindle 2 were not that great there are very high quality voices which are more useable the MacOS Alex voice for one. To see where this all might go you can visit an experimental talking book library in Western Australia www.cucat.org/library/ which permits the public to download DAISY digital talking books (www.daisy.org) recorded in higher quality voices.
Wil Wheaton has evaluated the Author Guild's claim and found it stupid. Other wise authors concur.
The Authors Guild acts more like you'd expect from a Book Publishers Guild, though I'm sure a large number of authors are on their side on this.
This really makes the choices obvious for authors, as well as for the dim-witted authors guild:
Either you:
a) Think you can profitably produce and market an audio book version of your work, or
b) Realize the audio book market for your work is too small to be profitable, and you'd be better off taking advantage of Kindle's no-cost-to-you TTS enhanced sales of your e-Book, or
c) Both of the above. The truth being that TTS is decades away from sounding anything like an emotive prosodic human reading, and that the market overlap between true human read audio books and robotic sounding TTS is miniscule.
***
As far as how TTS will improve, I can only see two long-term possibilities that will allow it to approach human quality:
1) It'll be based on a human-level AI where it can interpret the text as well as a human. It'll happen, but not for a long time.
2) An expert system approach, based partly on language/speech expertise, and partly on limited semantic analysis (e.g. based on something like Cyc) where plain text can be analyzed and marked up with prosody/voicing/emotional, etc, annotation to be interpreted by a suitable enhanced TTS engine. This doesn't need to be done in real-time - e-Books and other content could be offline processed into this enhanced form. This option wouldn't result in as nuanced a performance as a human one (because it'd be based on minimal understanding of the text), but it could be a major step up from the minimal prosodic/etc rules built into TTS engines today, and the current lack of emotional/voicing control. We're still talking years if not decades of research and development though.
Amazon should not have caved to this ridiculous request. The final choice is with consumers, who should refuse to buy any book that they can't run through text-to-speech or any other device that enables them to use their purchase.
While I agree that Amazon should have told these guys to go fuck themselves, what they have actually done is a brilliant "carrot and stick" maneuver that will ultimately get them what they want:
1. Amazon gives in to the Guild's demand (the carrot), and will conveniently label those books on their site which prohibit TTS.
2. People who think the Authors Guild is a bunch of dicks can boycott the clearly-marked titles and purchase others.
3. Sales of TTS-prohibited books plummet (the stick).
4. Authors Guild realizes that their greed has actually cost them money, and reverses their decision.
~Philly
You know, I am not a lawyer, but I wonder how the Americans with Disabilities Act could affect this in the end? Essentially, Amazon.com was offering a reasonable accommodation permitting any blind person to read any of the e-books that they sell. As I understand it, businesses are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled customers. At this point, the publishers are basically making an unreasonable insistence on reducing accessibility. I think it unlikely that they will be able to successfully block the feature.
After all, programs like JAWS already make many major applications and the web accessible. Imagine if web pages started blocking access to their websites for screen readers? It would be ridiculous, and this is too.
Sounds like a lot of work. I'd rather just buy the amazon.com book, and then download the pure text file off bittorent as a "backup" that I can conveniently play in my laptop or Iphone or Kindle.
Of course since you now HAVE to do this in order to have the Kindle TTS work it makes me wonder how many people will simple skip the amazon.com step. It seems to me that this is the usual result of DRM: customer is prevented from doing something reasonable, customer gets really irritated with the company, customer finds out they can stick it to the company by downloading from P2P, customer stops being a customer.
Wait till Amazon offers the Kindle Android Fembot. And then the lawyers put restrictions on it.
Then maybe people like you will come to understand why these issues matter. Or, maybe I should rephrase that...
I hear ya! Those iPods. I really wish they could play something other then iTunes DRM files. Every other MP3 player plays, well, MP3s, and we all know you can't put DRM on those! Or even if I could take a cd I own and put it into the iPod format so I could listen to it on the iPod and not have to buy it again from them. Mean ol' Steve making me buy the White album again. If only I'd have known that I'd have to buy everything I wanted to listen to from iTunes.
Maybe someday someone will figure out how to get other files onto a Kindle so you don't have to buy everything from Amazon...
...and in some countries, "fair use" is not provided for in any case. For instance, it is still illegal here in Australia to copy the contents of a legitimately bought CD which you have to your iPod, even though you will not be listening to your iPod and your CD player at the same time, thus satisfying the provisions of the original licence.
This legislation should be easy to fix. Trouble is, the greed of the copyright holders is less easy to deal with.
I believe what will ultimately happen is that they'll have two tiers of Kindle books - one with audio disabled, at the current price; and one with audio enabled, which will cost more. Amazon wins because they generate more profit; and the Author's Guild wins because they can claim they're working for their constituency. In the end, it's only you and me that gets the shaft.