Good day, gentlemen. Eighteen months ago the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered. It was buried 40 feet below the lunar surface near the crater Tycho. Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter the four-million year old black monolith has remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose are still a total mystery. — 2001: A Space Odyssey
Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, defends his organizations right to kill Kindle’s free text to speech on the grounds that authors are not getting paid ancillary rights, in an editorial in the NY Times.
Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.
I.B.M. has patented a computerized voice that is said to be almost indistinguishable from human ones. This voice is programmed to include “ums,” “ers” and sighs, to cough for attention, even to “shhh” when interrupted. According to Andy Aaron, of I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson research group speech team (samples): “These sounds can be incredibly subtle, even unnoticeable, but have a profound psychological effect. It can be extremely reassuring to have a more attentive-sounding voice.”
What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books. For this, the guild is being assailed. On the National Federation of the Blind’s Web site, the guild is accused of arguing that it is illegal for blind people to use “readers, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio.”
In fact, publishers, authors and American copyright laws have long provided for free audio availability to the blind and the guild is all for technologies that expand that availability. But that doesn’t mean Amazon should be able, without copyright-holders’ participation, to pass that service on to everyone.
Stuff and nonsense, says Business Week. It won’t replace voice actors on audio books. The Kindle also plays audio books from Audible.com.
IBM researcher Andy Aaron told CNET News on Wednesday that the audio-book market has little to fear from “synthetic voices”. “I’m a big believer in (text-to-speech) and a booster of it,” said Aaron. “But I don’t think at this point, or for the foreseeable future, it’s going to compete meaningfully with a professional book reader.”
Kindle e-books use the built in Whispernet service to download books in their proprietary (.azw) format for digital rights management. Books protected by DRM are restricted to a specific user and transferable on up to only six Kindles. Authors keep only 20% of the retail cost. Amazon says authors and publishers can choose to submit their content without DRM, using the Amazon Digital Text Platform, so books can be shared with more than six Kindle users.
The Kindle also reads a small collection of non-DRM, Amazon-owned Mobipocket e-books and includes a simple Web browser, for quick wireless Wikipedia checks and blog reading.
Each spring, the Audie Awards are given to the top nominees for performance and production by the Audio Publishers Association, a not-for-profit trade organization. Here are the 2008 winners.
Free ebook readers for the iPhone and iPod Touch include eReader and Stanza. Both also work on regular computers (Windows or OS X). The eReader handles it’s own .pdb format and not much else.
Stanza (above), supports the same .pdb format (encrypted or not) as well as nearly 20 other non-DRM formats. For Android phones, FBReaderJ is available free, with others likely on the Android Market. Over 2,100 publicly-available ebooks are available from the University of Virginia Library’s Etext Center.
Audiobooks (Open Directory), were estimated to be worth 871 million US dollars in 2005, according to Wikipedia. Current industry estimates are around two billion US dollars at retail value per year.
E-books (Open Directory), have yet to achieve global distribution. Only two e-book readers dominate the market, Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader. Whether eBooks are the greatest advancement in publishing since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press remains to be seen.
