Adam B. —
February 11, 2009 @ 12:31 pm 
You may have read our previous post about Amazon’s Kindle 2–which features TTS, and lots of it: Any document on the Kindle 2 can be read to users via the device’s TSS.
And, as convenient as that may be, the Authors Guild is saying that Kindle 2’s TTS violates copyright law.
According to Paul Aiken, executive director of the Author’s Guild: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud… That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
Check out the full story here at Fast Company.
Interesting argument, but there isn’t even consensus in the literary community. Neil Gaiman’s opinion differs from the Guild’s, and I’ve linked to it below. To summarize, he says:
“When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.”
Of course, Gaiman is one of the few authors able to make a living off his writing, due to his novels, comics, and movie deals. Additionally, he writes fiction so, as he points out, TTS might be expertly concatenated, but it has no sense of dramatic or comedic pacing, which leads to an underwhelming user experience.
I wonder, however, if nonfiction authors–especially those who write books people read for content instead of pleasure–feel the same way. Nonfiction sells better than fiction, so I can only presume the bulk of Kindle downloads will be nonfiction…
Comment by DK — February 12, 2009 @ 11:35 am
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