Amazon.com statement re Kindle and text-to-speech
Amazon.com released this statement on Friday:
Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.
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.
Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.
Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Labels: ebooks
Posted by Rob on Saturday, February 28, 2009
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8 comments
8 Comments:
Wow. You and the others who believe this way must have been putting enormous pressure on Amazon for them to have such a swift policy reversal. I've seen news reports where Amazon is portrayed soley as the villian. They must not like this role very much.
Congratulations on your "win."
Stephanie
Hi, Stephanie. Credit where credit is due. Although I do think my comments here and elsewhere on this topic were cogent and correct, the real pressure clearly came from The Authors Guild. :)
I think Amazon has shown a lot of class here, and am impressed by the swiftness of their response.
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Hi, Shawn. Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comments.
A couple of points: first, a number of commentators have suggested that Amazon.com's retreat on this issue has had less to do with respecting authors' rights than it has with protecting Amazon's $300,000,000 investment in Audible.com. That is, despite all those who are dismissive of this first-blush attempt at TTS for ebooks, Amazon has realized that real strides are being made in this area, and that they might have been cannibalizing one of their own revenue streams.
And, second, no one, anywhere in this tread or elsewhere that I've seen, has addressed the point I've made repeatedly, namely that since day one ebooks have had printing turned off ... and yet few people raised a fuss. Why is TTS of such great interest, and the printing of ebooks isn't, unless in fact the TTS rights are inherently valuable? And, if they are inherently valuable, why would anyone object to the creators of the underlying intellectual property being compensated?
For what it's worth, I won't be buying the Kindle 2, but it's for different reasons than the ones I've seen here.
Also, I was wondering how you felt about the way things turned out - you said something before about wanting to set a legal precedent. If amazon settled out of court, is this really a win?
Speaking as one of the people who did raise a fuss when DRM ebooks couldn't print, and when ebooks were DRMed in the first place... yes, text to speech is inherently valuable. Probably even more valuable than printing. We certainly agree about that.
But who is objecting to the authors getting paid for their hard and brilliant work? Unless I missed something major, misters Gaiman, Wheaton, Scalzi, Doctorow, and Lessig have not said that or anything like it. And I, for one, am about to launch a fundraiser for my own favorite author. I think we all agree on that point, too.
The only point on which we seem to disagree is that you and the Author's Guild say that DRM is an okay way to enforce copyrights.
I don't, so I've restricted myself to html and txt ebooks. The selection is small, but it's enough for me. And most anything by Charlie Stross, I find, needs multiple readings anyway!
"You said something before about wanting to set a legal precedent [in court]." No, I didn't.
"Is this really a win?" I didn't say it was; indeed, I posted the Amazon.com statement verbatim without comment.
"Speaking as one of the people who did raise a fuss when DRM ebooks couldn't print ..." URL, please?
"Unless I missed something major, misters Gaiman, Wheaton, Scalzi, Doctorow, and Lessig have not said that or anything like it."
No, but Mr. Gaiman's agent did, and so did the Authors Guild -- which represents 8,000 authors. Still, that authors have a variety of opinions on this or any other subject shouldn't surprise anyone, though -- and there actually ARE more authors involved in this than the handful you mention.
Really, for most of the reading public the contractual relationships between authors and publishers are something they know nothing about; one would hope that the discussions of the last few weeks have been enlightening. I certainly don't speak of the fine gentlemen you mentioned, but it's also true that most authors are hopelessly clueless about their own business (which is one of the reasons they have agents).
The point at hand is over what "display rights" mean, as those are the rights Amazon.com acquired. If they are exercising rights they don't have, and those rights are of value (can be sold to another), then one should protest them being taken without permission.
Amazon.com pays $0 up front for the ebook rights to titles -- they just pay royalties if people happen to buy them; Audio-book publishers, on the other hand, pay thousands of dollars up front for the audio rights to titles (and pay royalties, too).
"The only point on which we seem to disagree is that you and the Author's Guild say that DRM is an okay way to enforce copyrights."
Oh? Where did you see the Authors Guild articulate that position? Searching on "DRM" at the their website produces zero hits; searching on "digital rights management" doesn't seem to turn up anything on that point either.
And where did you see me say that I favor DRM? I myself am agnostic on the issue (me, I kind of like the kind of social DRM eReader.com uses -- brands the book with your name; requires your credit-card number to unlock it, but can be unlocked on an infinite number of devices; I won't buy Mobipocket books because their DRM scheme is too restrictive, and requires Mobipocket to stay in business).
However, see here for an interesting discussion that suggests that it is Amazon.com, not authors or publishers, who want DRM.
My apologies for writing in a terribly unclear fashion. I will try to clarify. If I miss any points, please remind me!
*) Ebooks which you have published, what formats would you prefer to see them in? Txt/html is very easy to feed into 3rd party TTS freeware, so that might mean that a plain flat unencrypted text file is, for all intents and purposes, an audiobook.
If that's true, than selling ebooks that are not audiobooks probably requires some sort of encryption. You have to make the book easy for a human to read yet hard for a machine to read to a human. Can you do that without digital rights management?
If you can't, then the Authors Guild is requiring Amazon to use DRM. They didn't use those words, of course. Like Kirk Biglione said, now Amazon has no choice but to use DRM on the Kindle. Of course, that's what they wanted to do from the very beginning... you know what? That link you sent me said everything that I wanted to say on the subject, and it said it better than I could. So let me just say "What Kirk Biglione said," and move on.
*) I never said that you favor DRM, simply that you seem to be okay with it. That you don't mind using it from time to time. That you are sometimes comfortable with it.
I wish the Authors Guild would fully articulate how they think ebooks and audiobooks and DRM should be handled. But since there are so many of them, and I like your books, I ask you first.
Actually the eReader seems quite inoffensive. Maybe I should check them out in more detail. Credit/debit card numbers are something I don't mind keeping secret.
And something else we agree on: the Mobipocket plan is just not cool.
*) I really, really phrased my questions badly. You never called the amazon-AG settlement a win, but Silverfish did. Well... actually Silverfish called it a "win", not a win. I wished to express my doubt that this is a happy ending for you. 60% happy, maybe?
*) ""Speaking as one of the people who did raise a fuss when DRM ebooks couldn't print ..." URL, please?"
I'm sorry... you want a URL of me complaining about crippled functionality due to digital rights management?
*) "...why would anyone object to the creators of the underlying intellectual property being compensated?"
"No, but Mr. Gaiman's agent did, and so did the Authors Guild -- which represents 8,000 authors."
My question was: Who is objecting to authors being compensated? Did you say that Mr Gaiman's agent is?
*) "Still, that authors have a variety of opinions on this or any other subject shouldn't surprise anyone, though -- and there actually ARE more authors involved in this than the handful you mention."
I am aware of that. I mentioned the authors I did because they are the ones I follow most closely. I do not believe they would object to authors being compensated.
*) "If they are exercising rights they don't have, and those rights are of value (can be sold to another), then one should protest them being taken without permission."
I absolutely agree - Amazon has done a bad thing here. I've distrusted them ever since their one-click patent, and I distrust them much more now.
It's my feeling that Amazon should buy audiobook /and/ ebook rights to the books they want to sell digitally, and if they can't get the audiobook rights that they should not sell the ebooks. If they were doing that, would that satisfy you?
I'm about to take off on a trip (off to Los Angeles to watch the TV series pilot based on my FLASH FORWARD be filmed), so don't have time to answer this in depth, Keith David, but to your final point -- that Amazon shouldn't be able to sell an ebook at all unless they've also acquired audio rights -- I totally disagree.
The ebook business has never before, and only for less than a month now, been tied up in the audiobook business, and Amazon itself has backed away from the issue.
Plus, if you expect Amazon to start paying advances for audiobook rights to ebooks, well, that ain't ever going to happen.
As I said, Amazon DOES NOT buy rights to the books it sells as ebooks -- that is, it pays NO MONEY up front. And if you think they're suddenly going to start cutting checks to authors or publishers in advance for the right to sell ebooks with audio rights attached, well, that's just not going to happen.
Audiobook publishers DO pay advances, and do provide thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of value added to the property in question; Amazon.com doesn't pay advances and provides nothing more than a conversion-to-ebook-format service from existing RTF text, which is a trivial, machine-automated, batch-processable task (and a distribution channel to which the cost of adding a single additional title is trivial).
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