Will The Authors Guild Freak Out About Text To Speech On The iPad?
from the yakety-yak dept
When the second generation Kindle ebook reader launched with a text-to-speech functionality, the Authors Guild freaked out, claiming that this violated a totally made up on the spot aspect of copyright law. Plenty of copyright lawyers dissected this claim in great detail and concluded that the Authors Guild was making up stories about how they wanted copyright law to act, rather than paying attention to what copyright law actually said. There simply is no copyright violation in having a computer read a book aloud to you. However, after the Authors Guild ratcheted up the threats, Amazon finally caved and let authors choose to block the text-to-speech functionality.Now, with the iPad coming out, some are noticing that it, too, contains such text-to-speech capabilities, and yet oddly, we haven't heard complaints from the Authors Guild (found via Copycense). Have they come to their senses, or have they just not realized it yet?
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Filed Under: authors, ebooks, ipad, kindle, text to speech
Companies: amazon, apple, authors guild
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Haven't realized
Then will come the lawsuits.
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Re: Haven\'t realized
More importantly, one of the things writers know is that the best way to determine if the dialogue you've written is any good is to hear it aloud. Normally this means either saying it aloud yourself, which is the worst of the options, or having family/friends read it aloud as if you were reciting lines in a play. But if the voice inflection and modulation is any good on this software, as in if it doesn't sound like a speak and spell, this could be a GREAT tool for authors to use.
Let's hope the AG doesn't take a big steamy shit on this the way they have in the past....
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Re: Re: Haven't realized
Of course the voices that come with Mac OSX are not very good. Cepstral has some better ones (including my favorite: Dog!) but I don't want to shell out that much for just a voice.
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Only a matter of time.
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A bit Different
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Re: A bit Different
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Perhaps we can expect publishers to release two versions of each book, just like iTunes' DRM free tracks.
$9.99 for the book
$11.99 for the book with text-to-speech allowed
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No!
Steve Jobs can do no wrong in the eyes of the artsy types.
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Exactly. Anyone who is writing a nastygram to Apple on their MacBook is obviously going to pause and think a bit.
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iBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page.
It's interesting that they chose to say "any page." I'm guessing that the text-to-speech is limited to the current page rather than 'start reading and stop when I say to'. If you want to hear the next page you will need to go to the next page and start the text-to-speech again.
Hopefully I'm wrong.
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Hilarious!
Two final questions. One: I wonder how long the statute of limitations is on copyright infringement if copyright or other infringement this is? Two: If I feed a book to Office (no conversion) and have it narrate it to me, does that violate the DMCA vis-a-vis cirvumvention?
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With Apple backing the text to speech, as well as the blind foundation and now dyslexic's the authors guild would do well to stay quite.
On a side note the spelling of word dyslexic must be a cruel joke for a dyslexic person to spell.
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And Android has text to speech also
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