Kindle text-to-speech issue is a lot of talk

11.02.2009
While the , Amazon's e-book reader, has impressed many, there's at least one group that's taken issue with the device: the Authors Guild. The association, which is a professional organization for writers, has objected to the fact that the Kindle 2 features text-to-speech functionality that can read books aloud.

The Guild's executive director, Paul Aiken, that the capability violated authors' copyrights, as Amazon doesn't own the rights for audio recordings. The --recording rights, such as those for audiobooks, are often sold separately from the text itself,but that raises the question of whether or not text-to-speech synthesis constitutes an audio recording.

Part of this is the Guild playing the long game: right now the quality of text-to-speech isn't a replacement for a professional recording read by an actual narrator, but the Guild clearly doesn't want to be in a position where they're betting against technological innovation. If it cedes this debate now, it's going to have a harder time arguing against it in ten years when text-to-speech is a lot better (compare today's text synthesis engines to those of ten or twenty years ago to see how far we've already come).

[Think text-to-speech is already good enough that it'll replace audiobooks? I've uploaded a recording of this article read by me and one read by OS X's Alex so you can compare for yourself.]

But setting the legal issues aside for the moment, it seems to me that while the Authors Guild is playing for the long term, in the short term it's a hair's breadth away from shooting itself in the foot. The Kindle is the most influential technological device in the e-book market and it has the potential to do for text what the iPod did for music. Right now both the e-book and audiobook markets are relatively small compared, say, to online music. There's also probably a decent amount of overlap between the two markets, as they share the same underlying demographic of people that still read--itself an increasingly small minority of the general public.

Publishing companies--and through them, authors--; they're also starting to feel the same crunch that the music and movie industries have run into in this increasingly digital world. Adaptation is needed if the industry is going to survive in this day and age.