http://www.physorg.com/news158259748.html

NEC Corporation announced today the development of two new technologies that evaluate an author’s feelings based on text data in order to automatically generate entertaining blog content. The technologies produce a variety of text decorations and feature an entertaining text-to-speech function that generates synthesized speech based on the positive or negative emotions expressed in a body of text.

Listeners around the world can access the web page:

http://blindcitizens.org/live
which has information and links for listening to the live event. It is recommended that you access this web page prior to the event so that you can install the Talking Communities conference web browser component in advance. A flash based and mp3 stream may also be available at the above web address.

Does the authors guild really want to criminalize people with dyslexia? They are quickly moving down the path of the to join the RIAA as one of the most hated professional organizations.

Brian Rowe
3L Seattle University Law
Soon to be dyslexic IP lawyer, who is more then willing to fight this type of abuse of copyright law.
PS I agree with Michael Scott’s comments also.

If publishers and the Authors Guild want to get TTS disabled on books they are already planning to release in audiobook form that would be fine, but whether they realize it or not they’re working toward having TTS disabled on ALL ebook content, on ALL devices. Publishers’ and the AG’s claim that all they want is the right to disable TTS on a book-by-book basis is specious, because it’s a lot cheaper and easier for hardware and software developers to disable TTS entirely than it would be to invest the time and money in developing and administering a tracking mechanism to distinguish TTS-disabled books from TTS-enabled books. Simply disabling TTS altogether carries the added benefit of pre-empting any future legal battles over the issue as well. In this economy, I could hardly blame tech companies for choosing to bow out of the battle.

The argument that TTS cannibalizes book sales is also specious, for two reasons.

First, who do they think would buy *both* an ebook edition and an audiobook edition of the same book? If you want to hear it (and it’s available) you buy the audiobook, if you want to read it you buy the print edition. In order to get the “free” TTS reading on a Kindle 2, print-disabled customers have to buy the Kindle book.

Secondly, as anyone who regularly listens to audiobooks knows, flat narration can ruin the listening experience. If you doubt it, check out some of the (many) reviews at Audible in which an audiobook was panned not for the content of the book, but the quality of the narration.

I have little doubt that given the choice, the print-disabled would much prefer to buy the professionally-produced audiobook that’s being performed by a professional actor. But if the book in question isn’t offered in audiobook format, TTS is a better alternative to refusing to sell them a ‘readable’ book at all, isn’t it?

Author and publisher objections based on TTS voice quality are ridiculous as well. If your book is offered in an audiobook edition, the print-impaired who want the book will buy that edition. And if your book *isn’t* offered in audiobook edition, it’s impossible for TTS to cannibalize your audiobook sales anyway. Nobody who opts to listen to a book via TTS expects a full audiobook experience, they know it’s a stopgap, but it’s better than nothing. None of my books have been released in audiobook format, and I’m glad TTS is there to make my work accessible to the print-impaired.

All this brouhaha over audio rights is really just a curtain being drawn shut in front of what publishers and the AG are really driving at, and that’s DRM. As a group, they’re (needlessly) worried about the theft of digital copies, whether in audio or print form. It’s a pity the needs of the print-disabled are being sacrificed on the altar of bulletproof DRM, especially since bulletproof DRM will never exist so long as there’s one guy in the world with a lot of time, sharp hacking skills, and a desire to get free content.

Studies have shown that the illegal peer-to-peer music file sharing that was rampant a few years ago actually drove *more* sales of the legal files. Consumers are willing to pay for digital content, so long as it’s easy to do so and the digital content doesn’t place excessive demands or restrictions on them.

The AG and publishers don’t seem to realize it but they’re working very hard at cutting off their noses to spite ALL our faces—publishers, authors and readers alike—, the end result of which will surely be reduced sales and reader alienation. And despite the fact that the Guild and big publishers are driving these demands, when their demands are finally met, individual authors will end up paying the price—and not just in terms of lost sales.

When consumers feel their rights to free use of content they’ve legitimately purchased are being denied, or severely limited, their attention naturally turns to the public face of that content: the author. When publishers and the Guild have succeeded in imposing Draconian DRM measures on digital books, *they* are not the ones who will end up looking greedy and insensitive to readers: authors will take that hit. The Reading Rights coalition addresses its ‘open letter’ of protest to *authors*, not publishers or the AG.

As an indie author, I strongly object to publishers and the AG taking a position that will almost certainly force developers to abandon TTS, because now they’re infringing on MY right as an free agent to make my work available to whomever I want in whatever form I want.

Part of my motivation for choosing the indie path was freeing myself from outside control over my work, but it seems that the gatekeepers of publishing are bound and determined to drag all authors everywhere down with them. With TTS disabled the potential audience for my books will instantly go down, and while I’d very much like to make audio versions available, I lack the time and skills to produce my own audiobooks or podcasts.

Way to go, AG and publishers. With mainstream publishing in crisis, I’d expect you to be working on ways to attract readership, not reduce it.

Second, the Authors Guild claims that reading the text out loud is a “public performance,” which is also wrong. If that were true, anyone playing a radio in their car with the windows rolled down, or having a musical ringtone on their phone, would also be a copyright infringer.

As usual, copyright owners and others take an absolutist view of what they think copyright law should be versus what it is.

What I expect to happen on the Kindle is that all major publishers will disable read-aloud on all their ebooks, because they have no explicit language in their contracts with authors that allow it. Kindle owners will then be much more likely to strip the DRM from Kindle ebooks, just so they can exercise the right than Amazon agrees they have (disabled or not) for their Kindle to read aloud to them. So, creating a new class of DRM strippers is the only way I see the Authors Guild advancing the cause. I think such circumvention would be legal in the US if ever tested in court, but the odds of this ending up in court are vanishingly small.

White people are not going to change their ‘stance’ because their position to discriminate is logical, consistent, and correct. Black people may dislike or deny this reality (call it ‘black people rights’), but it is the way things are and it is not going to change – managing who gets to drink out of what water fountains is how white people continue to rule the world.

[Moderator's note---just to be on the safe side: Ross obviously intended this as satire, comparing the access-challenged to those discriminated against by race. - D.R.]

Since I had no clear answer to this question, I did a little research. I had never encountered a Reader ebook without TTS. As usual with MS, the story is more complicated. With Reader, the TTS system can’t work with DRM for some technical reasons (according to MS). Since I never buy DRMed ebooks, all of my books work with TTS whether the author likes it or not. So for MS Reader DRM=no TTS, not for legal resons, but for technical ones.

MS’s Reader website has some weasel words on copyright, but the bottom line is that they have no plan to fix this. It looks like Amazon is better at software design than MS, but MS is luckier in avoiding potential litigation, by incompetence.

Sadly,
Jack Tingle

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-6637.htm

The United States Copyright Office (Copyright Office) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) seek comment on the topic of facilitating access to copyrighted works for ‘blind or persons with other disabilities’ in connection with a forthcoming meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Interested parties are invited to submit comments on the topics outlined in the supplementary information section of this notice. The Copyright Office and USPTO also announce a public meeting on the same topic.

I will post my comments at http://www.accessiblepublishing.org when they are ready for their close-up.

“The problem is that publishers and authors feel that allowing the [copyright] exemption relieves them of the obligation to publish in accessible formats in the first place.”

“So Hachette outsourced their disabled customers to Bookshare – umm, isn’t that discrimination? Why didn’t they pay Bookshare to convert their e-books to accessible formats so they could sell them along side their ‘regular’ e-books for ‘regular’ customers?”

So what do you think the real goal of the Authors Guild is, Bob? Where do envision the market going with respect to authors’ payments and the marketplace? Do the publishers care at all about the “rights” issue or are they merely caught in the middle?

Well, if the Authors Guild and its members are perceived as the bully, the market has ways of punishing them. Just look at what is happening to Amazon, on their own site!

http://electroniccottage.net/post/91965691/kindle

Kindle owners have organized a boycott of Kindle editions over $9.99. The uprising is ably helped by Amazon’s own online tools: the 9.99boycott community and a boycott discussion forum. Cleverly, the boycotters are using the Amazon tags feature to tag books over $9.99 with the 9.99boycott tag.

I encourage the Authors Guild’s support of accessible libraries, but that is ignoring the larger point. The creation of ‘authorized entities’ providing support for the disabled does not mean that we should discourage support for disabled people by non-authorized entities.

Oh, and the authors already get paid. What you are encouraging is a shop-by-rights store which I can guarantee you will fail.

You have elected to buy Programming In Python. Would you like:
[*] Colored-syntax code ($1)
[*] Ability to print (10|25|50) pages ($1|$2|$4)
[*] Text-to-speech ($1)
[*] Multiple device support ($5)
[*] Synchronized bookmarks ($1)
[*] Extra-large font support ($1)
[*] Dictionary lookup ($1)

(I should probably stop typing now before I give the Authors Guild too many ideas.)

The key point is that while such features do increase the value of the book, they do not do so in a discrete manner that works for the market. If I were to guess at the mindset of those responsible at the Guild, I would presume that they are just now waking up to the fact that ebooks are for more dynamic than paper books and, rather than see an increase in market prices that reflect those advantages, they are using that fact as leverage to argue for higher royalties.

Not that higher royalties for the author are a bad thing. I am strongly for them in most cases. However, there is the right way to go about seeing that increase, and this current method is not it.

Ok, enough about carts.