You have to be careful when trying out new products not to fall in love and get to over-the-top with your review. But it’s hard to do that with Amazon.com’s new Kindle 2, which I have been using for the last week in preparation for my interview with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
You could call Kindle an electronic book, but it is really as many as 1,500 books and it is also newspapers, magazines, newsletters and blogs and with a built in ability to communicate wirelessly with the Amazon Kindle store you can samples, buy and subscribe simply and seamlessly and have the content at your fingertips within seconds. Yes it may be costly ($359 for the unit) but if you think through the value of convenience and the savings on content, most books cost $9.95, the economies make sense.
Kindle 1 was just a little too clumsy and a little too slow for my taste, but Kindle 2 is a sleeker, faster and lighter model and now that I’ve tearfully sent the review machine Amazon loaned me back I’m saving my pennies for a Kindle of my own.
One new feature of the Kindle 2 a text to speech facility which enables the machine to read to you! Yes, this is still a noticeably machine like voice, you can select male or female, but it does a pretty good job and is a significant advance from the robotish machine voices you may have heard in the past. And therein lies the problem.
The Authors Guild has taken aim on the Kindle 2. While acknowledging that authors and publishers receive royalties for every e-book sold for the Kindle, the Guild argues that the text-to-speech capability means that every Kindle book is both an e-book and an audio-book, and that authors are being cheated because they are not receiving royalties for the audio rights. The Guild’s president, author Ray Blount Jr., recently wrote that audio book rights are usually worth more than e-book rights and that audio books represent market which is a billion dollar and growing.
The Guild has been attacked for its position by, among others, the National Federation of the Blind for obvious reasons, and also by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which warned that if the Guild’s theory of copyright law is sustained, parents might find themselves hauled off to court for reading bedtime stories to their children.
I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t want to play one on TV or the web, but I think the Guild will have a tough time making this case. From a technical standpoint, I think the Guild position that every Kindle book is both an e-book and an audio book fails because there is only one file, the e-book, and the e-book contains only the representation of the visual text. There is no separate file representing the audio, a “fixed copy” as the copyright prohibition against unauthorized duplication would seem to require. This is also not a public performance, its private if it’s a performance at all. The audio is created on the fly by the computer program in the Kindle, which is why you can have the same dispassionate voice read to you whether you’re reading a book, a newspaper, a blog or an e-mail.
Furthermore, good audio books have some value added which clearly goes beyond the original text and qualifies as a new creative expression. It could be the author reading her own work. It could be professional voice actors employing different voices for dramatic effect. It could be sound effects, etc. These production values, which the Kindle cannot match, give the audio book the added value worthy of copyright protection. Someday you may be able to buy audio books through your Kindle and listen to them played on the device. That separate purchase would certainly produce royalties for the creators.
This is a great example of how technology gets ahead of our laws and regulations and even of our social mores. Its hard to keep up, but we have no choice.
Comments
It is discussed over many blogs in the net, but you approach to the Kindle text-voice feature issue is the most clear and reasonable for me (even though you are not a lawyer). Thanks for the post.
As both a co-author of two international bestsellers and a reading addict, I found your thoughts on Kindle2 very helpful and thought-provoking. We live in a difficult world where an author needs both 1) a sense of purpose and feeling his/her ideas are making a difference and 2)the physical safety of remuneration and the recognition that makes the (usually poorly remunerated) effort all the more worthwhile.
As usual, your comments account for many points of view. thanks.
I must agree. The tree main points. It is not a recorded stand alone interpreted media and is no more than an assisted reading device like the child's mother cited in your article and if the ADA or Rehabilitation Act of 1972 is to carry any weight, is protected as a reasonable accommodation.
Gregor Cunningham, North Carolina
There's a product that's far less expensive than Kindle 2 and provides access to many more books and publications. It's called a library card.
It seems that we're coming up with more and more ways to never leave the house. We have on-line banking, on-line shopping, take-out-taxi, grocery delivery, on-line job searching for work-at-home jobs, Netflix and virtually every kind of electronic gadget that keeps us from contact with the outside world. The financial world is getting back to basics; maybe the rest of us should as well.