Comments on: Amazon misread book sector on speech feature

Amazon botched the handling of text-to-speech. The retailer should have floated the idea past publishers before launch or at least been prepared to fight for the feature.

[gary85739]

Down load plenty of "on-line/spoken" books from you're local library website!

FREE

[gary85739]

You MUST go to the library and fill out a "library card" FIRST!

Then check out their website and you'll be listening to books forever for FREE!

[gary85739]

Down load plenty of "on-line/spoken" books from you're local library website!

FREE

[gary85739]

We've heard that during "downturns in the economy, libraries flourish"!

HELP THEM FLOURISH,,,GET A LIBRARY CARD ASAP!

[LadySeraphina]

You do realize libraries pay for their books via your tax money? Authors do get paid on those sales. It's no different than you buying a book and lending it to all your friends. Someone made the initial purchase.

In this case, Amazon tried to usurp audio book rights without the copyright holder's knowledge. I've heard the Kindle text-to-speech function "performed" over a live internet stream. It is damn good. Not the usual crappy robotic speak. It's perfectly understandable that authors would get worried.

And for those wondering, authors usually make less than 10% per book sale. Amazon takes 40-50% and the publisher gets the rest (30-40%). Publishers began putting electronic rights clauses in their contracts when e-books first hit mainstream almost a decade ago. So even though it costs almost nothing to release a book in electronic format, writers still only got 10%. The only rights authors kept for themselves were "audio" which is at a higher royalty rate. Of course authors would zealously protect their ability to get a higher royalty for their work.

If Amazon truly wanted to break the traditional publishing paradigm they would circumvent the publishers alltogether and just work out a higher royalty rate to authors who want to enable the feature.

I'm happy to have my novels on Kindle with text-to-speech enabled but then I have a decent indy publisher who's entire business model is based on 21st century technology and fairness to authors. I get the same fair royalty (30%) regardless of the format someone reads my work. But if I went with a big publisher I'd be screwed royally.

[kenwaP]

I love deals on amazon.com. I wish they offered more coupons!

[spinoza2]

The author of this opinion piece couldn't be more wrong on this, as the many comments here point out. Imagine if Google had quietly, behind the scenes, first consulted publishers about its Google Book initiative with major research libraries! Of course the publishers would have said ?No way?, thus preventing one of the most important information initiatives in history from being carried out. The publishing industry lawyers, like the RIAA, are along with these organizations an interest group in themselves, and are out of touch with the rank and file authors who simply want their works to be out there in the marketplace. The automated text-to-speech is a significant benefit for sight-impaired readers, it simply presents the same material in another way. It is not, as others have pointed out, a derivative performance.

[sandonet]

Spinoza2
Sandoval here, the author of the blog. You say I'm wrong and that Amazon couldn't have consulted with publishers because they would have somehow hijacked the offering...but isn't that what has effectively happened anyway?

[Bertil_Hatt]

Someone on his personal blog suggested that, thanks to Bezos' move, those of you who disagree with disabling Text-to-Speach should vote down and leave a very harsh comment on every e-book that prevents the reading; he compared it to what happend to the game Spore. Due to the rather graphic image he used, I won't link to it ? but that idea appeared to be free of copyright and easy to be re-used.

I am personally convinced that many would be curious and use the Text-to-Speach function, realize that an audio-book would be much better, and be tempted to buy the audio version; availability and easy comparision (thanks to an possible audio-book extract) would make this feature a very efficient leverage for audio-books.

[DocMWood]

One thought for Amazon and the Guild....

Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Guild just prevented a reasonable accomodation to those with disabilities. Perfect opening for a costly law suit.

I'd like to wish them well, but.....

[J.G.]

I think this will all turn out to be a tempest in a teapot. Despite having the option, few publishers will actually ask to have speech-to-text unavailable for their products. For one thing, it means vetting individual books for whether doing so makes sense. Then, there is the matter of the Americans with Disabilities Act and making accommodations to it. But, most importantly, the quality of text-to-speech is too poor to offer any real competition to audio books.

Another telling aspect of this is that Amazon owns the largest audio book provider, Audible. Methinks Bezos knows better than to undermine one of his ventures with another.

[martusfine1]

Yeah, I guess it's quality if you like books that sound like they are read by Stephen Hawkins. C'mon, publishers are so out of touch these days.

[richard993]

Text-to-speech should be a disability requirement mandated by law. By disabling this feature, Amazon is disabling the device for those who are visually impaired and may open itself up to lawsuits from customers with disabilities. If I was an author, I would love to have my book on this device and have my book read out to those who either have difficulty reading, are visually impaired, or have special needs (whatever they might be). I don't understand the mentality behind this guild and frankly, they are trying to reach with their greedy little paws, way outside their bounds.

I have a Sony Reader, and although initially I was extremely skeptical about these devices, I am now convinced that short of OLED technology, this is bar far one of the best reading devices I have ever had (mainly because of the battery life). If authors don't make their books available on these devices, they will surely miss out on a great opportunity to revolutionize how we read.

[bookish09]

I have to assume that most people who are against the Guild are not within the publishing industry, and the people who are for Amazon are mainly readers. This new feature is just the tip of the iceberg in what seems like an ongoing battle for publisher/author rights, so you have to understand the whole picture.

This is not the first time Amazon is taking away the rights of publishers and authors (I am neither a publisher or author, just an industry professional), and many of you have to see the history of what Amazon is doing to truly understand what is going on. There is no doubt that Amazon is a powerful company, but it is using this power to stronghold the industries publisher's and author's. Just google Amazon and booklocker, for the most recent lawsuit. You will start to see why organizations like the authors guild have to stick up for the rights of their members.

And, in answer to one of the comments above about how much an author makes from the sale of a book, they would get about $1, from a book that sells for $20, with 55% of that profit going to Amazon.

[lfeldman]

I don't believe that "hiding" the text-to-speech function was a conscious decision by Amazon. Its logic was that every PC and Macintosh can read text documents with their operating systems' built-in text-to-speech functions. Therefore, text-to-speech in the Kindle 2 was a benefit to readers that did exactly the same thing as hundreds of millions of PCs around the world. They simply didn't think that it would be an issue.

I'm somewhat disappointed that Amazon didn't agree to fight, but on the other hand, publishers commonly control whether or not portions of DRM-protected books can be copied or printed, and they often place limits on how much can be copied or printed. I'm not surprised that text-to-speech has gotten lumped into the same publisher-controlled category.

[gjl229]

Amazon mis-read nothing. They carefully skirted the well-known payment system for audio books and then took the capability back, blaming someone else.

Now Amazon's customers are riled up at others (see above) in a way that would not have happened if Amazon had dealt with the publishers and authors directly.

Amazon gets lots of publicity and creates lots of allies with little effort but a press release. Not a bad day's work!

Of course we know that the existing text-to-speech technology isn't appropriate for literature but once Amazon gets a precedent set, they need only wait for the technology to improve.

It's all about the precedent.

Not a bad day's work ....

[tbuccelli]

How does the Kindle differ from any other text-to-speech software on the Macintosh or PC? The Kindle is a computing device and offers a similar feature, with most likely less horsepower, so I would assume it would not be as capable as the full-blown Mac/PC alternatives?

Disabled users are rightfully angry at the Authors Guild.

[TV James]

So dumb. The publishers should be partnering with Amazon to give away the first chapter of the audiobook with the book so that people can truly hear the difference between an audiobook and how the Kindle reads it. That would sell more audiobooks.

[JayJaySmak]

The next thing you know, I will not be able to read a book out loud to a class room of children because it is a performance. This is getting down-right silly.

JJ

[RHartzell]

"For Amazon to be taking heat over this issue is silly. There's not that much in it for the company. Next time, they should take a few more risks with media leaks and get some guidance."

Amusingly, no one posting a comment here has noticed that Amazon's let's-add-text-to-speech to the Kindle 2 has obvious negative implications for Amazon's own Audible.com subsidiary.

Sure, Jeff Bezos undoubtedly felt that the state of the art in text-to-speech would have no meaningful impact on Audible.com subscriptions or downloads.

But as many others have pointed out here, in 5 or 10 years text-to-speech may be virtually indistinguishable from a human recording. Where will Audible.com be then? (I suppose the short answer is that Audible will have morphed into a company selling e-books plus a lineup of interesting synthetic voices for your listening pleasure. <g>)

I've worked in publishing and bookselling my entire adult life. Those of you who think this is all about authorial greed -- who think the Authors' Guild is just like the RIAA -- obviously know nothing about the penury of this business. Very, very few people make a living writing books. Fewer still make a good living. Were any of you to write a popular book and discover that no publisher was interested in recording and releasing it on CD or MP3 because handheld text-to-speech reading devices made such formats redundant, do you think you'd be glad?

The introduction of the MIDI format in the '80s has all but destroyed the need for musicians to employ humans (otherwise known as session musicians) to record and release albums. The same will shortly be true for audiobooks.

That's progress I guess.

[RHartzell]

One other thing: you can read read Authors Guild president Roy Blount's NY Times op-ed take on audio rights for the Kindle 2 here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html?scp=1&sq=roy%20blount&st=cse

[Spats30]

The publishers should not worry. The text-to-speech feature does not read a book like James Earl Jones was reading/narrating it. It's not like if you were to purchase the "book on CD" from the publisher. It's a basic, very not stylish, no emotion/inflection text parser. Nothing to be concerned about. And if it leads to more sales of the book, then the publishers should be happy.

[troglodytia]

How hard is this? For Kindle buyers who are certified as visually impaired or have some other difficulty that would be eased by the text-to-speech feature, let them state that and have a doctor certify it to Amazon. Yes, they shouldn't have to go to that extra trouble, but making these exceptions case-by-case may be the way it has to happen. Although possibly a person with this kind of disability could manage to get Kindles with TTS enabled for a bunch of non-impaired friends.

I'm still going to get a Kindle. The TTS feature is not a big deal to me - I'm seldom in a situation where I would use it. At a beach, while I tan? Maybe while I work on a laptop? I'll be buying the Kindle to feed my book-reading addiction. The visual is much more important to me than the mechanically-spoken word.