Spectacularly Missing The Point About TTS
Plenty more stuff about Roy Blount’s op-ed in the New York Times concerning Kindle’s Text-To-Speech function. (My initial take on it was yesterday.) I’m just going to point you at Wil Wheaton, who got together links to Scalzi, Gaiman, and Doctorow’s responses. Doctorow’s in particular seemed to go over the line into enraged. YMMV.
I am left wondering if these guys read the same op-ed I did. I saw it as Blunt saying: “We need to be vigilant about our rights here.” I really wonder if others read stuff about the piece elsewhere on the Net that colored their response to it, calling Blount a big meanie etc. etc., and getting All Het Up.
One thing Scalzi said was that he pitied the person who thought TTS was a replacement for audiobooks or someone reading work aloud, implying that therefore this tech wouldn’t take off and be a threat. Look, that’s not the point. I understand ebooks and am glad my work is accessible that way, but I don’t read them. (This is purely personal preference, here.) I prefer paper and I pity people who don’t have the sensual experience of a book in their hands. I can still insist that I get my royalties from ebooks and that torrenting is stealing.
It doesn’t matter that a computer reading it isn’t the same experience as a human reading it. The point is that the technology is there and someone is going to try to figure out how to make it workable to steal. Just like people figured out how to make ebooks easy and workable to steal. This is just human nature, folks. Someone is going to do it; plus, this is a new way to distribute and spread author’s works, we need to look at those rights and get them codified in contracts JUST LIKE AUDIOBOOKS AND EBOOKS. It’s that simple. I don’t see anything wrong with saying so, or with Blount saying so from his platform as president of the Author’s Guild. I like AG and am a dues-paying member because I think it’s valuable for the legal help alone, though God knows I don’t want to ever have to use that. So, I disagree. Not vehemently or anything, but I really totally disagree with the points being made so far in that corner of the Interwebs.
Anyway, that’s probably my last word on the whole issue, since it seems emotions are getting involved and that means nastiness can’t be far behind. Besides, I’m spitting distance from finishing this short story, and I want it done and out of the way early so I can fix the second YA book.
It’s snowing here, off and on–it’s too warm to stick and we’re getting spatters of desultory hail too. It’s good writing weather. Hell, any weather is good writing weather. Especially when you’re writing an antihero half-vampire in suburbia.
I do love my job.
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February 26th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I do think it would be best to get a contractual clause in now. Far too soon machines may be able to read with good enough inflections that they *do* replace audio books. The recent writer’s strike is a good example of technology (the net) advancing into uncharted territories.
February 26th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I do understand your point about text-to-speech, but it’s difficult for me to see how you could enforce anything. I read ebooks on my macbook. I can listen to any ebook on my mac right now by clicking CMD-A (select all) and CTRL-OPTION-T (my keyboard shortcut for text-to-speech. (I use TTS frequently when proofreading my work, because it helps me catch typos.)
I’m not sure how familiar you are with TTS or with Apple’s built-into-the-operating-system TTS, but it’s VERY good. “Alex” (the voice I prefer) actually “takes a breath” when he needs to, and somehow is capable of recognizing the difference between “I need to wind my watch,” and “The wind in the trees” (and other similar context-specific pronunciations)
I can TTS anything on my macbook–any text, .doc, .pdf, .html, and pretty much any other common ebook format–and there’s little any author or publisher could do to stop me. So, it seems to me that unless authors want publishers to pay for audiorights when they pay for ebook rights too, always, then it seems a tough thing to justify going after Amazon, when non-kindle ebook readers can easily do the same thing on their laptop or desktop.
February 26th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Terra,
Amazon is pretty ubiquitous. Making our point with them will help set an industry standard.
Thank you, by the way, for indirectly confirming my point. (i.e., I can TTS anything on my macbook–any text, .doc, .pdf, .html, and pretty much any other common ebook format–and there’s little any author or publisher could do to stop me.)