Amazon backs off on Kindle text-to-speech feature
According to Brad Stone in the New York Times “Bits” blog, Amazon has announced that it will leave up to the publisher the decision of whether a book can be read aloud by the Kindle’s speech synthesizer. In their statement, they continue to insist that the feature is completely legal—”Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rights-holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”
(This reminds me of the flap caused by Adobe back in 2000 when the company released a PDF of Alice in Wonderland through Glassbook whose description included the line, “This book cannot be read aloud.” Some fraction of the Internet got up in arms over this, given that Alice in Wonderland was in the public domain—but it turned out to be a misunderstanding based on Adobe disabling use of a speech synthesizer function of Adobe Reader on that particular file.)
From one perspective, it is highly disappointing that publishers will be able to turn off a really handy feature that should be entirely legally permissible and is in no way a threat to professionally-produced audiobook recordings. But it is understandable that Amazon might not want to alienate publishers at this point. Hopefully the majority of publishers will take the sensible position that authors such as Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman have put forward—that the read-aloud feature is neither an infringement nor a threat.
Of course, if the stricture against reading aloud is enforced by DRM, all that a Kindle customer would need to do is offload the Kindle book onto his computer and use the tools that already exist for cracking Mobipocket DRM to get around that. (At least for the Kindle books that use the Mobipocket format.)
Regardless, the Pandora’s box of text-to-speech has been opened, and I would not be surprised if other e-book reader manufacturers included it in their machines as well. There is no guarantee those other manufacturers, or even Amazon, will be willing to listen to the Authors Guild forever.
February 27th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
That’s just dumb. MS Reader has had text-to-speech available for years (2005). AFAIK, no on ever complained. Talk about locking the burning barn after the dying horse has stumbled out, this is it.
Disgustedly,
Jack Tingle
February 28th, 2009 at 12:45 am
“MS Reader has had text-to-speech available for years (2005). AFAIK, no on ever complained.”
I haven’t used MS Reader in years, but text-to-speech has always been turned off for all copy protected works by default, IIRC.
Although disappointing, I’m not shocked to see Amazon give way like this. There are more important issues.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
I have to ask the same question again: will Amazon make this available for the copyright holders who publish through the DTP? We seem to be only a secondary thought, if that, in these decisions.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:01 pm
While it’s a lovely device due to the readability, storage, size, and efficiency. The Kindle 2 is still subject to the whim of the Author’s Guild it seems, and therefore any information that flows through the device will be ruled by a consortium of folks with an outdated view on media ownership and control.
Publishers will control the text-to-speech feature.
This type of feature change after the release of a product is frightening or at the very least damaging to Amazon’s market position for it’s Kindle Books.
It amazes me that we are finding new ways to value information for it’s pertinence, quality, and timeliness on the internet but our vast riches of older written information must suffer in it’s availability due to old thinking.
I suggest a simple solution, one media rule that rewards any media authors based on the popularity of their works as well as sociably redeeming qualities. The capitol can be generated via ads to free users, or by subscriptions to those that prefer to avoid ads.