March 2nd, 2009
Amazon's Kindle cave shows the power of publishers
Catching up with Kindle news: Amazon says it is re-doing the text-to-speech function to aid publishers’ and authors’ comfort level, but that the feature is absolutely legal:
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. . . . 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 rightsholders 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.
Nothing less than caving, News.com Greg Sandoval said. Rather than the Kindle innovating a new mode of experiencing books, Amazon has decided to take a pass, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohmann put it:
Amazon decided to allow copyright owners to make the decisions themselves whether to use the feature. They are entitled to do that. The issue of text-to-speech will have to wait for another innovator.
Perhaps Amazon underestimated the strength of the opposition. It wasn’t just the Authors Guild, executive director Paul Aiken told Sandoval.
Amazon realized the magnitude of the contractual problem. Many of the author’s publishing contracts give publishers the right to publish e-books, but only without enhancing audio. A reasonable reading of those contracts shows that publishers didn’t have the authority to sell e-books for use in a Kindle device with audio enhancement.
