Authors Guild President Wants To End Royalty-Free TTS On Kindle 539
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.)
Anonymous Coward (Score:1, Interesting)
OP needs to settle down and think about 10 years in the future when TTS *is* able to replace a human voice. Amazon is essentially licensing an e-book, and then turning it into an audio book, which has it's own licensing scheme. I for one actually agree that you should not be able to buy one and get the other for free - they are fundamentally different.
That said, what should happen is that each e-book has two flavors - TTS capable and not. The TTS capable version costs more to cover both licenses.
Dicing us ever more finely... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let's do a reality check (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Great. What about Special Needs Kids? (Score:2, Interesting)
HE WAS READING CAT IN THE HAT!!! ALOUD!!! OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!!
Or afternoon reading sessions at libraries...
Volunteer book reader: "OK Kids - today we're going to read one of my favourites... Ready? OK! It goes like this...
One fish
Two fish
Red fish
blue fish..."
(BLAMMO!!!! - the door is blasted off its hinges)
Stormtroopers barge in.
"OK LADY!!!! FACE ON THE FLOOR!!! EVERYBODY DOWN AND SHUT UP!!! YOU'RE UNDER ARREST FOR VIOLATING COPYRIGHT WITH THE AUTHORS GUILD!!! TAKE HER AWAY BOYS!!!!"
She is kept in a squatting position for days in a transport plane, shuttled between one hellhole outpost of the American empire to another. She is ordered to form a naked pyramid with the folks at EFF and Pirate Bay. Eventually she confesses and realises she truly loves Big Brother. By surrendering her autonomy to financial interests she doesn't care what she remembers...she's entertained...
RS
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Interesting)
You and your fellow Author's Guild members (and the RIAA) need stop thinking of 20 years in the past. You also ought to look at what copyright law says, and stop trying to nickle and dime everyone to death.
Licenses are for publishers, not end users. I don't licence a book, I buy a copy.
If I buy a paper book I can do any damned thing I want with it, including reading it aloud or putting it on a scanner and letting the scanner read it aloud.
Luddite cave men like you are the reason the major record labels and newspaper chains are going under. Adapt or die. Want my advice? Do everyone a favor and die, you are hindering freedom AND progress.
public v private (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Advocacy organizations (Score:3, Interesting)
People who head advocacy organizations, such as the Authors Guild, have to have issues they can push so as to get members of their groups to pay dues. If there are no real issues, they need to invent them.
This is more true then people realize.
Case in point: the city where I grew up is an industrial mill town where almost everyone is union. At some point in the late 70s/early 80s a union for barbers came through and unionized all the barbers there. And of course you pretty much had to join because the other union workers wouldn't go to a non-union barber shop. They were advocating for better pay, working conditions, etc. It sounded great to all those involved.
So what could possibly go wrong? Well for one, most barbers either owned, or co-owned, there own places so who were they protecting their jobs from? 'The man'? They were 'the man'. Secondly, the union tried to get uniform pricing across all barbers but this was a silly notion. A barber with experience had to charge the same as the new guy. Also, if someone was just plain better than another they still had to charge the same even though they could only see so many clients per day.
In the end the union failed because everyone realized they were paying dues for nothing. There are no longer any union barbers in the town and everyone sets their own prices to what the market will bear.
NOTE: As someone who comes from a family of union workers, I am not bashing unions. I am critical of the fact that in some places the market is better without them, especially in the case of skilled labor.
Re:not crazy, auditioning for a job w/ RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
No kidding.
Non-infringing use #1 I can think of: setting this thing to play in the car like a normal audiobook. I have a few other "audiobooks" loaded to my ipod that are the result of running scanned or otherwise digital copies through text-to-speech software and it works well enough when there is no alternative (e.g. no professional audiobook) available. I'd love to be able to get some more favorites/classics for times when I can't sit to "read" but can listen perfectly well.
It almost sounds like this asshole thinks he's the next Jack Valenti or something. I keep expecting to see a quote about the Boston Strangler.
Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.
I won't deny it's a useful revenue stream but seriously, how about if you sell more copies of the books anyways? Of my collection of books, less than 2% have an audiobook version available. If I can buy the digital version for a fair price and then run it with text-to-speech, I'm happy. If you do not provide such an option, plenty of people will resort to less-than-legal means.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more consumers will slip through your fingers...
Re:What an idiot (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let's do a reality check (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Let's do a reality check (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:What an idiot (Score:3, Interesting)
and it isn't those authors funding this.
it's the jk rowling's.
jk rowling gets rich, lots of other writers starve because she is getting too much of the pie.
books should be much cheaper than they are. current prices are based on costs that no longer exist.
there are a million other forms of entertainment they compete with that did not used to exist.
Hmmm $8 for a paperback, or $8 for a DVD of a movie, or $24 for a video game that plays 20 books worth of time, or ...
Books are way overpriced now. My solution is mostly the same as for music- I just stopped buying them. If they were $4, I would probably buy them-- $8 for a paperback (1000% inflation in 30 years-- they were .75 when I was in highschool) is just stupid when some authors are making a billion dollars (and you know the publishers and the bookstores made at least another billion each as well).
Re:Advocacy organizations (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, sometimes 'unions' end up in places that 'guilds' should be.
In the modern world, those terms are often interchangeable, but guilds aren't there to set prices except at the lowest rung of the ladder. For example, the Actors Guilds set 'scale', below which you can't hire an actor, but they don't have any caps on the top.
A barber's guild, something to represent them to the outside world and ensure that there are minimum standards (For example, that people actually know how to cut hair.) and minimum prices (So that employees aren't pay minimum wage to cut five people's hair, at 10 dollars each, an hour.) makes sense. A barber's union does not.
Re:not crazy, auditioning for a job w/ RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's your reality check (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Here's your reality check (Score:3, Interesting)
E-books sell for less than half to a quarter of audio book CD prices and fewer copies are sold.
I don't believe this.
I can get almost every audio book for $9.99 each (though things like audible.com subscriptions), and I can't believe that equivalent eBooks are $2.50. A quick check shows that this is true, as eBooks are between $5-15, depending on the title. Compared to MSRP for CD-ROM audiobooks, the eBook might be 25%, but not to real-world prices for the content.
And, although audible.com does have DRM, the PC software they provide will burn a book to CD-ROM to turn it into a normal, non-MP3 audiobook that works in 100% of CD players.
Re:not crazy, auditioning for a job w/ RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:1, Interesting)
I've enjoyed his stuff for some time, but Blount has royally pissed me off with this. He and the Author's Guild can go fuck themselves.
Blount is just saying that publisher's need to charge kindle's e-book rights at a rate closer to audiobook rates. And if Amazon does not like that then they need to stop offering the audio conversion.
Amazon can go do whatever the hell they want, the publishers can do whatever the hell they want, and the authors can do whatever they want. Amazon doesn't need to do anything. The value of an ebook is determined by whatever people are willing to pay for it, not what the Blount thinks it is.
Pardon my language, I'm getting so fucking tired of people not understanding that information is dirt fucking cheap. They need to get over outdated ideas of value. Sure--at one time people would pay twice for an audiobook and print book. However, that's because there wasn't a medium that would do both. If someone comes up with a medium that does both, it doesn't mean that medium = audio format + print format, it means the latter two things lose value because it's suddenly become easier to do them.
Valve's CEO raised similar issues in the gaming industry recently:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/159805/dice_valves_newell_says_pirates_way_ahead_of_us.html/ [pcworld.com]
What people in the publishing industries--whether that be music, film, books, games, whatever--don't realize is that publishing has become a whole lot fucking easier in the last 15 years. People at home can do it. The way you make money is by charging a price (really super dirt cheap) that reflects the new value, and offer it at volume. Publishing doesn't make money anymore, the product does, and only then if it's offered cheap to a lot of people (which is now possible in ways that it wasn't before).
What Blount should be demanding is that Amazon _reduce_ the fucking price, of everything--way below audiobook or print prices--to drive up demand.
Re:Here's your reality check (Score:1, Interesting)
You are looking at the price of the books. the price of the books might be only 25% more. But the earnings are higher (price-cost). For each book sold the authors and publisher get more for audiobooks than for e-books. A large fraction of the cost is the distribution and retail costs which is subtracted from the revenues before the author and publisher every see the income.
Additionally Why do you think e-books sell for as much as they do? Do you think it is because perhaps they are trying to avoid cannibalizing print and audio book sales?
I'd bet if they can sever the e-book and audio book rights as blount wants, they can reduce the cost of e-books quite a bit
Re:not crazy, auditioning for a job w/ RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as someone who is visually impaired and not totally blind, a device like Kindle is not only usable but also much nicer than some of the other book reader options available, having seen the interface I can easily see myself using such a feature as an option.
But back to the point at hand!
I see where his argument comes from, but this goes well beyond the era of audio books when the real consumers were people like me (or people who didn't like actually reading I suppose). We're in a new era where an e-book could be purchased and run through a desktop text to speech program. Where does that fall legally, has that even come up before? Is the primary concern that there is a loss of revenue to the author or is it the loss of revenue to the audio book publishing industry?
Technology has evolved in such a way that a single creative source can have multiple delivery points to the intended consumer, to me (and others it seems) legal fighting over those delivery streams seems counter productive to the original artists' goal and almost completely focused on keeping (perhaps?) deprecated methods of content delivery alive.
Either that or I'm in the mid-afternoon slump and parts of my brain are shutting down...
Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books (Score:3, Interesting)
Blout is saying that if you canablaize a high profit audio book sale with a low-profit e-book sale then you simply need to charge more for e-books to make the total for the authors come out the same as before.
The problem with this is, not everybody competes in the same market. The number of books available in tape/cd/mp3 form is a small percentage, at best, of the number of books put out each year. Many books either see audiobook release only years after their initial release, or not at all.
Kindle offers you an interesting opportunity: MORE books can be available in a digestible (even if slightly imperfect) audio form, than can be made available with the standard "pay someone to read it to me" setup. Will there still be people willing to buy the other audiobooks? I would hope so. Not everybody will have a Kindle.
Even if it does cannibalize some audiobook sales or transfer some revenue or put some professional audiobook readers out of work, that's the changes that always happen with technological improvement. If you think your property is "too cheap" with Amazon as an ebook? Charge Amazon more for your property. See if people are willing to pay for it or not.
it's okay if the overall price declines. indeed this is great since it may increase sales. But in the end you can't simply lower the price by lowering the author's roylaties.
What if the royalties begin getting spread around more authors? More books available on audio = more authors needing a piece of the pie, theoretically. Ultimately, there is a limit to the discretionary spending of consumers and the number of minutes in a day, and you're competing. Video games compete with DVD movies compete with books compete with audiobooks compete with Ebooks compete with audio CD's compete with radio compete with broadcast TV compete with fast food restaurants compete with nicer restaurants compete with zoos compete with the local symphony compete with Lallappalalalala tour [wikipedia.org] compete with... you get the idea.
Either you put out your product in the most digestible, most consumer-desired form, or you suffer the consequences. And if you price reasonably, you can massively increase your sales [shacknews.com] and make more money than if you're a tight-fisted asshole.
Re:Advocacy organizations (Score:1, Interesting)
First, an healthy union would be concerned about keeping high standards as far as work output and quality. In the skilled trades the major unions have multi-year apprenticeship programs and often work with employers to estabish training certification programs. Not all unions do this, but those that do provide significant extra value to both their members as well as employers.
Second, I've yet to see any contract prevented a unionized employee from being fired when there was legitimate cause to do so. By legitimate causes I mean not only gross incompetence but also dangerous or criminal behavior. In contrast, union contracts generally impose sufficient time and effort to the dismissal process necessary to prevent terminations with questionable justifications.
Third, your comment on the other "perks" being a result of a sense of entitlement is asinine at best. Extending it just a little further and anyone; union or not, blue- or white-collar, who wants to influence their working conditions has a "sense of of entitlement". Also recall, that when unions started, things most people take for granted like at least one day off a week or basic work safety was a "perk" that many workers didn't have.
Re:not crazy, auditioning for a job w/ RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at Adobe vs Sklyarov & Elcomsoft back in 2001.
Adobe tried to prosecute for creating software that enabled blind people to read e-books. The jury chose to exercise their constitutional right to find them not guilty.