
According To Author's Guild, You Cannot Read Books Out Loud - nickb
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090210/1014293724.shtml
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electromagnetic
The Author's Guild is a pathetically small and out dated organization. They
have 8,000 members, yet there's approximately 170,000 books published in the
US every year and most authors only manage a handful of books per year, which
suggests they have an exceptionally small member group, this is if _all_ their
members are authors, which they're not a lot of their members are agents and
attorneys. Compare this with the SFWA and as a niche market, SF/F/H, you would
expect them to have significantly less members, yet they have 1500, which is a
comparatively large number. The other thing that lends credence to the SFWA
over the Author's Guild, is that I actually _hear_ of the SFWA outside of
stupid legal arguments. The last Author's Guild scheme was against the whole
google book scanning thing, I believe Google paid them off and now no one has
the legal right to sue google for it ever again.

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brandnewlow
So the author's guild is upset that the Kindle has a read aloud feature that
does text to voice using a computer generated voice. Amazon isn't buying the
audio rights to these books like someone who does a book on tape.

Amazon's response:

"An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech
technology, and that listeners won't confuse it with the audiobook experience.
Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider."

This is hilariously disingenuous. Of course they won't CONFUSE it as an
audiobook experience...Amazon's hoping they'll EMBRACE it as something cheaper
and "good enough."

The Author's guild and the content creators they represent will get screwed
some more and Amazon's market share will grow. It's like the newspapers
letting Google "spider" their content (aka, copy it and use it for their own
purposes for free).

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tptacek
There is no parallel universe in which computer-generated text-to-speech
compares with a real audiobook. The Authors Guild should pick their battles
more carefully, because nobody is going to care about this stupid feature.

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brandnewlow
I haven't heard this new computer-generated voice, but surely Amazon's going
to iterate and iterate and iterate until it's "good enough" to disrupt the
audio book market.

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tptacek
They'd stand just as good a chance taking sheet music and lyrics and iterating
and iterating and iterating until it's good enough to disrupt Warner Music
Group.

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brandnewlow
Well, consider bands and production houses that use MIDI recreations of well-
known music instead of purchasing the rights to the actual recordings. It's
not good enough for most uses, but for some, it certainly is.

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tptacek
I don't think this is an invalid argument, but it sure is stupid. Clearly, you
can't read a book aloud, record that reading, and redistribute it --- even
with the original book. The argument would be, the Kindle circumvents that
restriction by not recording the actual voice, but instead an algorithm that
reconstructs the voice.

On the other hand, it's hard to believe anyone gives a shit about this; text-
to-speech readings are tolerable for minutes at a time, not 10 hours.

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jwilliams
Doesn't it need to be "fixed" - i.e. in this case recorded - to fall into this
category? I doubt reading out loud would qualify as fixed.

This probably falls afoul of anti-discrimination laws - i.e. speech readers
for the blind.

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Tichy
Instead of synthesizing speech, Amazon will have to employ it's mechanical
turk to have actual humans read the text ;-)

Now everything falls into place - brilliant strategy...

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jodrellblank
Not really hacker news, but if you're interested in mass-amateur-read audio-
books, <http://www.librivox.org> is a collaborative effort to read books
outloud (as long as their copyright has expired) where there can be several
contributors per book.

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gojomo
Librivox -- a distributed collaboration possible via the net, digitization,
and open licensing -- is absolutely Hacker News!

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swombat
Well, I guess Amazon will have to remove that feature from the Kindle then.

