In the New York Times, Author’s Guild president Roy Blount Jr. castigates the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature, claiming that it infringes copyright as it effectively is creating an audiobook without the right to do so. [via]
I think Blount’s argument contains a kernel of truth but he’s chosen the wrong target, the problem is not the technology but the agreements that authors might have with publishers.
It may be a long way off but eventually TTS is going to be good enough that a significant number of people will choose to buy ebooks to be read aloud on their device instead of buying an audiobook narrated by a human being.
This should be of no concern to authors as long as they get the same amount of compensation whichever form their work is sold in. I’m not privy to the rights agreements that authors might have with their publishers but if their is a difference then authors should take the advice of Neil Gaiman’s agent.
We’ve sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this.
I think that the only people who should be concerned by the future in which ‘audiobooks’ are all computer generated on the fly (if indeed that ever does come to pass) are the actors who work as narrators and the recording studios where audiobooks are recorded.
