Kindle 2, the Authors Guild, and the National Federation for the Blind
by Rob - February 14th, 2009.Filed under: ebooks.
As I’ve already said, I support the ability of the blind and visually impaired to be able to use assistive technologies — including screen-readers — to access text. Hell, anyone who’s read my Wake (recently serialized in Analog), which has a blind girl as the main character, can’t have any doubts about that.
My grandfather was blind for most of his adult life, diabetes (a leading cause of blindness) is rampant in my family, and I myself spent six days blind in 1972 (hospitalized with both eyes covered because of a severe eye injury); I am totally, totally sympathetic to the needs of the blind. If you’re blind, as I’ve said in this blog, I think it’s perfectly fine for the Kindle (or any other device) to help you access text you’ve legitimately acquired.
But the market that Amazon is pursuing with the Kindle is not blind users. We need to clearly understand that Amazon did not put text-to-speech in the Kindle as an assistive technology; they put it in so people could have books read to them while driving in their cars, and so on: they put it in to go after the market segment that now buys audiobooks.
You want proof? If it were an assistive technology, then the user interface for the Kindle 2 would also support text-to-speech, and it doesn’t. I quote Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, on this very point:
We note, however, that the device itself cannot be used independently by a blind reader because the controls to download a book and begin reading it aloud are visual and therefore inaccessible to the blind.
Now, some have said the text-to-speech quality is so bad that no one but the blind would routinely use it; it’s a “GPS voice,” as Stephen King called it. But it will not always be so; Amazon is savvy enough to grab the rights now when few will use this technology, rather than waiting until the technology is more mature and widely used.
Authors have ALREADY FOR DECADES NOW waived their rights to income from audio versions of their work made for the blind, whereas Amazon has said nothing about giving away ebooks — let alone Kindles — to blind users. We authors are the ones with the established track record of supporting the rights of the blind; let’s not forget that: we’ve been the good guys for decades when it comes to making our content freely available to the blind.
This is not an authors vs. the blind issue, and to paint it as such is unfair and misleading. I fully grant that an accommodation for the needs of the blind and visually impaired has to be found as we move ahead with technology, but an accommodation for authors’ rights has to be found, too.
And the bottom line hasn’t changed: contracts have been breached, and unless and until we decide that contracts don’t matter in our society, that fact should not be glossed over.
Indeed, I bet that if Amazon had approached authors’ organizations first and asked if they could do this, they would have gotten permission from authors’ groups to do it for free (or, perhaps, on condition that Amazon donate a portion of its profits on the Kindle hardware and the ebooks it sells to the National Federation of the Blind). But they didn’t ask. They just took the rights — and that’s wrong.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site