Probaby lawyers being proactive. Text-to-speech voices are klunky today, but think how much they have improved, and what they might sound like in 20 years.
So far, I've seen public comments from Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, and Cory Doctorow that the Authors Guild Claim is ridiculous.
I like Gaiman's best, which basically comes down to, "When someone buys a book, they also have the right to read it out loud or have it read to them".
Scalzi added that that an audiobook is about the performance of the book, not just the straight audio reading of it, and text-to-speech is unlikely ever to duplicate that, no matter how much the speech quality improves. And I think that that's a valid point as well. After all, part of the thing with audiobooks is who narrates them, and how well they do it.
I suspect that both of these arguments will be key points if this issue moves forward.
I hope so. On the other hand, as I have pointed out before, science fiction authors are not necessarily taken seriously by the mainstream. On the other other hand, Gaiman and Doctorow have both gotten a lot of public attention lately, Gaiman because of the Newberry award and Doctorow because of the Forbes profile. Still, I get crazy just thinking about the money and other resources aaccusations like this waste, and the impact it has on many administrators and lawyers who have very little understanding of the format differences and the actual relation to copyright, let alone the rights of the readers to read the book in whatever format is most comfortable for them.
Isn't the Authors' Guild the same group which attempted to bring legal action against Amazon a number of years back contending that Amazon's selling of used books was also some sort of copyright violation? As someone who has bought used books all her life--I never bought a new book until I went to college--I am just boggled at the way even used books have been tarred with the copyright brush. I saw a post to a mailing list where someone mentioned that it is illegal to read a book aloud because this also infringes upon copyright. How crazy is that?
I agree with the above comments. I'm glad to see that at least some authors this it's BS (admittedly ones I would have guessed as they are known for being tech savvy and supportive).
On a semi-related note, do you know anything about EPUB format accessibility? We're planning on using it at work for e-books and I keep thinking it doesn't look to me like it's going to be at all useable with screen readers. (I could be wrong)
Epub is not a format with which I am familiar, although the name does sound familiar, maybe it's being used by one of the online ebook collections? Anyway, it's really difficult to say if a format is accessible because most formats vary a lot, even within the same format, according to how the docs are being converted and the level of security the docs are being set with. The easiest thing to do is to maybe send me a doc of a few pages and I will find out if I can read it. It sounds like it has a specific viewer software program it is supposed to be used with, but I can also try to see if the doc can be converted to something friendlier, like MS Word or plaintext. It will be an access problem if it can't be read in soemthing like Word, because the adaptive tech many blind people use, such as the text-to-speech notetakers or braille devices, need to be able to open up the docs in one of the editors compatible with their devices.
Also, people have very different definitions of the word "accessible," and many publishers and software programers use the word in a very different context than the one which applies to readers with disabilities having control over how they read books.
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I like Gaiman's best, which basically comes down to, "When someone buys a book, they also have the right to read it out loud or have it read to them".
Scalzi added that that an audiobook is about the performance of the book, not just the straight audio reading of it, and text-to-speech is unlikely ever to duplicate that, no matter how much the speech quality improves. And I think that that's a valid point as well. After all, part of the thing with audiobooks is who narrates them, and how well they do it.
I suspect that both of these arguments will be key points if this issue moves forward.
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On a semi-related note, do you know anything about EPUB format accessibility? We're planning on using it at work for e-books and I keep thinking it doesn't look to me like it's going to be at all useable with screen readers. (I could be wrong)
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