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Authors Guild Silent Over iBooks Text-To-Speech
Last year we discussed news that the Authors Guild took issue with the Kindle's text-to-speech function, claiming it was illegal for the device to read their books aloud. Amazon disagreed, but said they were willing to disable the feature upon request from rightsholders. Now, jamie notes a recent article by David Pogue at the NY Times in which he points out that Apple's free iBooks app does the same thing, yet the Authors Guild has remained silent. Quoting: "... Now swipe down the page with two fingers to make the iPhone start reading the book to you, out loud, with a synthesized voice. It even turns the pages automatically and keeps going until you tap with two fingers to stop it. Yes, this is exactly the feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed when publishers screamed bloody murder. But somehow, so far, Apple has gotten away with it, maybe because nobody's even realized this feature is in there." That said, the feature was certainly noticed during the launch of the iPad, so perhaps the Authors Guild has other reasons for holding their peace.
so apple does not like blind people?
How does this hurt them on books where there is no audio version available?
Maybe the difference is that Amazon is seen as more of a threat than Apple?
Not being rhetorical here, I'm genuinely asking.
Maybe the Authors Guild has learned a lesson in how not to be pricks.
Since last year the LOC has made a rule that DRM breaks are legal if readers are shut out:
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
FWIW, I had no idea the feature was there. The annoying thing is that you have to turn on Voice Over in the accessibility settings...for the entire phone. So the whole interface of the phone changes (you have to double tap buttons, etc) and it's quite annoying to have it on if it's not something you need. I guess you can turn voiceover on/off at will, but it's a decent amount of hassle.
The douchers that are hamstringing the text-to-speech providers need to be bitch-slapped, twice.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I wish I had $800 to blow on gags at work. :(
Hate on Apple for having the feature while Amazon can't/doesn't or hate on litigious media groups for selective lawsuits?
Two very touchy topics in the /. world!
Me? Oh, I don't discriminate.... I hate everyone! Then again... I'm an idiot ....
...... and idiots rule the world....
Who knew pissing off disabled folks (like me) wasn't a good idea to drive up business? All they accomplished with their little tantrum was to ensure that any books I buy in the future will be from the used market, to avoid supporting them.
We do seriously live in a society where (if everything could be magically made accessible tomorrow for free), some predatory capitalist goons would still try and charge us disabled folks $1500 for equal access... all the wile claiming to support the rights of disabled folks.
Yes, I know there are still a few iconclasts who use Windows (or TeX for the hardcore) but all the published authors I personally know are Apple fanboys. MBPs, Mac Pros (for writing? I know, I know), iPhones, the works. I imagine they don't want to bite the hand that pets them... But I'll ask one why it's okay for Apple and not Amazon.
Also, fwiw, Amazon owns Audible, the largest purveyor of spoken word books (or "books on tape" as they used to be called)...
I recall it boiled to down to significant "grey-area" books they were copyrightable (within the 120-year window) but no author or estate claimed the right anymore. Should Google be able to make money charging ads for page views of these books or should the publisher? The massive Google libraries digitization captured many of these grey-area books.
I suspect talking ebooks will take at least a decade to work out also.
Interesting point. That depends on your interpreted definition of "performance" of the work.
When you purchase a book, you certainly have the right to read it aloud in a noncommercial performance. So, yeah, no one is coming after our respective copies of "Goodnight Moon".
However, Amazon doesn't own a license to read the book for profit. So selling text-only e-books on a device that can actually read them aloud is tantamount to offering a "free audio version" of the book with every e-book sold. That means that Amazon is, in effect, selling unauthorized audio versions of their e-books and not compensating the artist/publisher for same. Sort of.
I'm not saying I agree with this argument, because you could argue just as validly that making the font scalable should be considered unauthorized unless Amazon sells it as a separate large-print book edition.
You think you're buying a right to the text, but the publishers want limits put on those rights so they can sell you other rights separately. Is having a machine read you a book aloud considered an "unauthorized reproduction"? Is it giving you more book than the publishers thought they were authorizing Amazon to sell? Obviously the publishers seem to think so.
But buying a "licensed for text only" book along with a device that can turn it into an audiobook by reading it aloud is a whole new legal concept, and one that blurs the line between text-only books and their higher-priced brethren, audiobooks. And allowing it to be read in a synthesized voice could set a dangerous precedent (from the publisher's point of view) since Amazon could license some good voices and arguably make e-books better than the audiobooks the publishers produce (because you'd get your choice of voices), thereby cutting into audiobook sales, all for a cut-rate e-book margin.
Amazon could even sample an author's voice (as long as sufficient recordings exist) and use that to read the book. What would you pay for a Mark Twain-like voice to read Huck Finn? The publisher would see none of that income. The author might not even see it, unless we are copyrighting voices now, and that could get tricky because you could just hire a voice-actor who sounds similar enough.
How about an algorithm that assigns a voice to each character and reads it off, while dropping the "John said" and "Frank replied" bits, with a neutral narrator voice to fill in the background? That's not very hard to do once you have the book in electronic text format and a little processing power. It would compete with multi-actor complicated audiobooks that cost good money to produce.
Once the words get out there in electronic form, we can do all sorts of electronic things to them.
Variants like this on written books are pretty much free money sitting on the sidewalk. The publishers want to make sure no one else can pick it up.
I don't think their arguments are correct, but I see where they are coming from and why they'd want to make those arguments, and there are vast cans of worms yet to be opened on this subject.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
There's no comparison between automated text-to-speech (TTS) computer voice "read aloud" and a published audio book with a decent voice actor. It would like a company that makes leather-bound gold-leaf editions of classics getting in an uproar over the fact the project gutenberg makes the e-text available for free. It's really silly for the author's guild to give two flips about either one. I seriously doubt there's *any* evidence that people who buy audiobooks are going to stop buying them because the ebook readers will TTS their books. [repost as myself]
Anecdotal evidence from at least one author doing self publishing puts the Kindle selling 60x more than Apple's ibook:
Publishers might be looking at enriched or enhanced ebooks as their new big-ticket items to replace hardcovers. But the major ebook retailer, Amazon, isn't set up for video. Kindle isn't even able to do color yet. That leaves Apple, and according to my numbers Apple is a very small part of the ebook market. I sell 200 ebooks a day on Kindle. On iPad, I sell 100 a month.
They had no business bring suit and I hope they have realized it. There is a difference between a copy of a book in a different format and a program that translates something into a different format. Is the rights holder of a German version of Harry Potter going to sue someone that writes a computer program that translates English into German? No of course not.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They could provide you with Patrick Stewart to read your book to you, and they STILL wouldn't be violating copyright. No license is required to read a book for profit; the license is required for public performance, not for-profit performance. The 2nd circuit made this point in the Cablevision DVR case.
My kindergartner is being exposed to this sort of copyright infringement EVERY DAY! Not only is there text-to-speech conversion at school (the teacher, who should be providing a better example) but they expect ME to convert text-to-speech at home and READ ALOUD to my kids! When will someone put a stop to this nefarious reading of books aloud?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed
No, it wasn't. It was disabled on select books if and only if the publisher specificially demanded it.
R.Mo
Hmm, I took your post above and ran it through text-to-speech and all I got was this old screechy voice screaming "SPAM, SPAM, EGGS, AND SPAM! IT HASN'T GOT AS MUCH SPAM IN IT!"
I think the technology is further along than one might assume.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"Some animals are more equal than others."
> didn't take future technology into account.
I had a BBC Master in the early 80s with a ROM chip that did plain text to speech very effectively. It could have read out books if I had them as text files so for nearly 30 years the technology has been available.
It didn't have a touch screen though.
Just for fun I enabled the text-to-speech on my iPad. It's so bad, it's laughable. The guild has nothing to worry about because only someone desperate would use that sucky text-to-speech instead of a good audio book.
Amazon gets sued for providing read-aloud technology on its reader, and Target gets sued, and loses, for NOT having read-aloud capability on its website.
Whose rights dominate?
"Would you sit through a 3 hour movie where the main actor was a speak & spell?"
Well, only if it had spectacular cinematograhy set to something powerful like Richard Strauss. Nobody'd be crazy enough to do that, though.
Copyright doesn't give authors exclusive performance rights to their work. It gives them exclusive PUBLIC performance rights. This is held to mean performances made in a public place. I can pay for a pay-per-view event, and invite friends over to watch with me, even though I never bought a public performance license. And, I can even tell them to bring wings or dip or something, and it's still not public. I can even ask them all for a dollar to help me pay for the PPV fee, and it's still not public!
So, along those line (and this should be dead obvious anyways) I am allowed to take a book, and read it to my children. The definition is public performance is actually even more restrictive than just a performance in public. There has to be an element of "performance" to it. That is, a DJ must have a license for public performance in order to play music. However, somebody with a ghetto blaster (unfortunately) doesn't need a license to use his device in a public place. So, given that, I don't need a license from Tor publishing in order to read a book out loud to somebody on a bus or in a park. Since, it's in a public place, but it's not really a performance. (The groups in charge of collecting fees are trying to change this by fiat, as in suing people for not breaking the law, such as going after Girl Guides for allowing their girls to sing campfire songs, and suing resturaunts for having a radio).
At any rate, given that I have the right to read a book out loud in my living room, I have the right to use a device to do it for me. Obviously its easier to make a device that reads an eBook out loud, but if one is legal, they both are. So, an eBook TTS reader has a substantial non-infringing use. The fact that I could also use it in public doesn't make it an illegal device under the DMCA. So, given that it's not an illegal device, there are no grounds for complaint at all. You can argue that Amazon is selling audiobooks without a license, in the same way as you can argue that a cable company that offers a PVR is selling video recordings without a license: poorly. Oh, it's been tried. They lost in court, though. Amazon is not selling audiobooks, they are selling ebooks and a TTS reader. They have a license for the former, and the latter is a legal device.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Well, I have seen Keanu Reeves films. I think that's a fairly close comparison. ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Microsoft Reader also has text-to-speech. I've not heard of any complaints about that either.
I recently published a Speculative Fiction book in March. And when things started to go a little bit south with my publisher, I realized that I had made some critical errors when I signed the contract which I did.
1. They had all my rights. Print, audio, electronic, foreign, etc.
2. They weren't doing anything with the rights except for print. And I was stuck... I couldn't do anything with electronic or audio rights myself.
What I learned:
1. Keep all the rights you can when you sell a manuscript to a publisher.
2. If the publisher wants a particular right, make them justify it. Put "performance metrics" in the contract so that they have to perform with the right given, or it reverts back to the author. And, don't make it open ended. Put a time limit on those rights.
Why?
Authors are realizing that audio and electronic rights are very, very valuable. But so are publishers. They are fighting to keep control of those rights. Audio can be expensive to produce at first, but electronic is nearly without cost. Once the typesetting and formatting is done for the print run, converting the book to e-reader formats is easy. It took me less than a day to convert mine. Every sale after that is pure profit. This is why publishers are scrambling to retain control. In many cases, their business models are not supported by the traditional methods very well, and they need this extra income to stay afloat.
I predict that authors and agents will continue to become more savvy in these areas, and therefore, the contracts they demand of the big publishers will continue to be better written, year after year. Authors will then find themselves protected by contracts which are fair, well written, and sane. This can only help promote technology... and audio will eventually become accepted on all e-readers. That is what I think will happen. Especially if it helps to sell books, no matter what format the book comes in.
Reality is Relative.
Last month, the US Copyright Office ruled that publishers must permit text-to-speech in eBooks, although they have the option to charge more for speech-enabled versions. The Copyright Office's rule will stay in place for at least three years. This is most likely the reason why the Authors Guild hasn't protested. Here's the link: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2010/Librarian-of-Congress-1201-Statement.html .
Well, both my grandmothers are dead, so I guess it's a win for Stephen Hawking.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
How is that "a side to the text-to-speech story?" It's got nothing whatsoever to do with TTS.