TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘text to speech’ Category

By Paul Biba

According to Publishers Weekly Hachette has issued a statement on its position on text to speech for the Kindle as well as other hardware platforms.

Hachette pretty much follows the Amazon position, saying that unless its authors object, it has no issue with adding TTS for the vast majority of its books. The only exceptions, HBG said, would be for “books that fall within our audio publishing program or specialized circumstances like memoirs, where the author or character’s voice is an artistic element of the work. Under such circumstances HBG reserves the right to request that the functionality be disabled.”

The statement said HBG arrived at its position have talking to the various parties interested in the issue. Hachette further noted that TTS “technology is likely to be a feature on an increasing number of devices in the coming months, and HBG recognizes the value of such functionality to individuals with impaired vision or similar disabilities.”

By Paul Biba

Now this looks very, very interesting and will certainly be a huge blessing to a large community of challenged readers. Here is the beginning of a long article on the site. There are far more technical issues than I would have imagined. Speech or not, anyone who is interested in creating EPUB books will want to read the article:

Recently I’ve been working on an ePub reader prototype. Once I’ve created a robust ePub ebook reader, I’m going to move this functionality into my text to speech application, Text2Go. My goal is provide a system that will convert an ebook to speech and transfer it to your iPod in a single click. This will allow any ePub formatted ebook to be turned into an audio book which can then be listened to while driving, walking, working out at the gym or any other activity where reading is impractical.

The focus of my ePub reader is quite different from the norm due to the fact that the recipient is not a human reader but a machine reader or computerized voice. A computerized voice cares nothing for fancy layouts, font selection or images. This makes my job a lot easier in many ways. However a computerized voice lacks one important skill a human reader uses frequently, often at a subconscious level. A computerized voice has no way of skimming over a section of text. For example, human readers will never read the same footer at the bottom of every page or meticulously read every page number. If this text is mixed in with the actual body of the story (usually as a result of some blind conversion process from a different ebook format to ePub), then the computerized voice will read this text in full on every page. This becomes incredibly irritating for the human listener.

By Paul Biba

If you’re an author, or if you are just curious, you might want to go over to Dear Author and take a look and Jane’s FAQ. Here’s an excerpt:

At the suggestion of Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, I offer up this Frequently Asked Questions for Authors regarding the Text To Speech (TTS) functionality that is the subject of debate. This may be an evolving document as more people provide input so that it adeqately addresses the issues. Please feel free to offer suggestions and/or revisions in the comments section.

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Q: I’ve heard that there is some debate over Kindle’s Text to Speech Function. What is it and should I be concerned?

A: When Amazon released it’s Kindle 2 in February, it announced that it had included the ability for every document/book/written work on the Kindle to be real aloud using a robotic voice (either girl or boy). You can hear a sample of it here as read by Wil Wheaton. The TTS functionality was switched “on” as a default. Author’s Guild objected to this on the basis that the right to read a book out loud was an audio right, a derivative right of authors under the Copyright Law.

By Chris Meadows

In a new column he has penned for the Guardian, Cory Doctorow suggests that the Authors Guild has “lost the plot” in their fight against the Kindle’s text-to-speech function.

After laying out why that function is not an infringement, or even if it is Amazon is the wrong one to complain about, Doctorow explains that the legality of read-aloud is irrelevant and what authors should be worrying about is Amazon’s ability to turn off features in the Kindle (that is, changing their mind and allowing publishers to choose to disable read-aloud for their books) after it has been shipped.

Writes Doctorow:

If I were running the Authors Guild, this would be my number one issue: we can’t afford to allow our books to be used to lure readers into purchasing devices that can turn against them. Because whatever bad feelings arise from this, some of them will surely be visited upon us.

While Doctorow writes with his usual cheerfully blatant hyperbole, he does point out an issue that readers of all DRM-locked e-books should bear in mind: the e-book seller, or the company that manages the e-book format if they’re not one and the same, can potentially do bad things to you after you invest in their product.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

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.

By Paul Biba

This is just so neat. According to Cool Hunting it lists for about $700.

Text-to Speech Peripheral Device

The Plustek BookReader features highly accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and auto document orientation. This combination guarantees correct output for TTS (Text to Speech). You only need to press one button, and the Plustek Book Reader will convert printed text into high quality speech with a lifelike voice.

Plustek’s BookReader integrates high-speed scanning, natural voice synthesis (for read back) and highly accurate text-to-speech and optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, all in one device. Additional features, especially designed for the vision impaired, include: magnifying functions, font controls, volume controls, speech controls, bookmark functions, PDF reading, etc. All of them combined make BookReader a highly versatile computer companion.

The BookReader comes with OCR and text-to-speech (TTS) software. Both of them allow the scanner to copy and read the documents scanned.

To use these features, the user simply places a book or document on the scanning platen and, with the touch of one button, the book is scanned for one’s reading pleasure. With a single touch, the Book Reader transforms printed words into audio output which can be saved in MP3 format for archiving and later access.

Embedded OCR guarantees accurate scan results and allows the software to rotate disoriented text to generate a clearer message for the user. The unit comes with Plustek patented SEE Technology which uses a curved lamp to provide a clear scan of the book without distortion along the spine of big, bulky books.

By Rita Toews

The release of the Amazon Kindle 2 has caused a bit of consternation with respect to the text to speech function. The Authors Guild immediately expressed dissatisfaction with the feature, claiming TTS is part of an author’s audio rights. They demanded that Amazon disable the feature. Amazon claims TTS is part of the author’s e-book rights and refuses.

Marilyn Byerly, writer and book doctor for established authors and a NY Times bestseller states in her Adventures in Writing blog: “The major legal problem with TTS is that it has never been clearly defined through a lawsuit or some other legal means. Right now, no one can say with legal certainty that TTS is a right on its own, a part of the audio rights, or part of the e-book rights.”

Marilyn’s excellent article on the subject can be found here.