Comments on: Spectacularly Missing The Point About TTS

By: Lili

Lili — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:11:54 +0000

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.)

By: Terra

Terra — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:47:10 +0000

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.

By: fanbot

fanbot — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:03:06 +0000

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.