The Author's Guild is a pathetically small and out dated organization. They have 8,000 members, yet there's approximately 170,000 books published in the US every year and most authors only manage a handful of books per year, which suggests they have an exceptionally small member group, this is if all their members are authors, which they're not a lot of their members are agents and attorneys. Compare this with the SFWA and as a niche market, SF/F/H, you would expect them to have significantly less members, yet they have 1500, which is a comparatively large number. The other thing that lends credence to the SFWA over the Author's Guild, is that I actually hear of the SFWA outside of stupid legal arguments. The last Author's Guild scheme was against the whole google book scanning thing, I believe Google paid them off and now no one has the legal right to sue google for it ever again.
So the author's guild is upset that the Kindle has a read aloud feature that does text to voice using a computer generated voice. Amazon isn't buying the audio rights to these books like someone who does a book on tape.
Amazon's response:
"An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won't confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider."
This is hilariously disingenuous. Of course they won't CONFUSE it as an audiobook experience...Amazon's hoping they'll EMBRACE it as something cheaper and "good enough."
The Author's guild and the content creators they represent will get screwed some more and Amazon's market share will grow. It's like the newspapers letting Google "spider" their content (aka, copy it and use it for their own purposes for free).
There is no parallel universe in which computer-generated text-to-speech compares with a real audiobook. The Authors Guild should pick their battles more carefully, because nobody is going to care about this stupid feature.
I haven't heard this new computer-generated voice, but surely Amazon's going to iterate and iterate and iterate until it's "good enough" to disrupt the audio book market.
They'd stand just as good a chance taking sheet music and lyrics and iterating and iterating and iterating until it's good enough to disrupt Warner Music Group.
Well, consider bands and production houses that use MIDI recreations of well-known music instead of purchasing the rights to the actual recordings. It's not good enough for most uses, but for some, it certainly is.
I don't think this is an invalid argument, but it sure is stupid. Clearly, you can't read a book aloud, record that reading, and redistribute it --- even with the original book. The argument would be, the Kindle circumvents that restriction by not recording the actual voice, but instead an algorithm that reconstructs the voice.
On the other hand, it's hard to believe anyone gives a shit about this; text-to-speech readings are tolerable for minutes at a time, not 10 hours.
Not really hacker news, but if you're interested in mass-amateur-read audio-books, http://www.librivox.org is a collaborative effort to read books outloud (as long as their copyright has expired) where there can be several contributors per book.
