The Kindle text-to-speech fuss: Big publishers were the real powers behind Amazon’s TTS retreat, says Authors Guild’s Paul Aiken
"’Amazon realized the magnitude of the contractual problem,’ Aiken said Monday morning. ‘Many of the author’s publishing contracts give publishers the right to publish e-books, but only without enhancing audio. A reasonable reading of those contracts shows that publishers didn’t have the authority to sell e-books for use in a Kindle device with audio enhancement.’ An Amazon spokesman denied being pushed into Friday’s decision and repeated what the company said Friday: ‘Kindle 2’s experimental text to speech feature is legal.’" - CNET News.
The TeleRead take: Yes, there are questions aplenty as to whether contracts could successfully silence a device that customers—not Amazon—use. And what about the quality-of-speech issue? We’re not talking about performances here and certainly not about human-natural ones.
But if Paul Aiken’s account is correct in so generously sharing credit, and if the big publishers have tasted blood, maybe they can next figure out some contractual excuses to encourage the use of ePub. Even without contracts involved, it’s still a good topic to broach with Jeff Bezos & friends. A separate Kindle format just adds to the existing confusion from eBabel and hurts the growth of the e-books—which will reach many people who might not mess with the paper variety.
Related: An open letter to Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild.
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I’m rather bemused that the Authors Guild is attacking Kindle rather than go after Adobe (whose Acrobat Reader has text-to-speech) and Microsoft Reader (which also has text-to-speech). Has the Authors Guild just woken up to the existence of text-to-speech?