Authors' anti-text-to-speech called discriminatory
updated 04:45 pm EDT, Tue April 7, 2009
Blind Fight Anti-TTS Plan
The Reading Rights Coalition today staged a counter-protest in New York City against the Authors' Guild for its resistance to text-to-speech conversion for books. The group accuses the Guild of discriminating against the blind by pushing Amazon to partly disable a Kindle 2 feature that automatically speaks out books, letting authors disable the feature. By making TTS only optional, the Guild is allegedly preventing the blind and poor-sighted from having equal access to books and simultaneously punishing them by making them go through special channels to get audio versions.
"The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a burdensome special registration system and prove our disabilities--or pay extra," the Coalition says. "The Guild’s position is contrary to the principle of equal opportunity for all and discriminates against millions of people with print disabilities."
Members of the Authors' Guild have so far contended that TTS violates their audiobook rights by performing the reading itself without any extra royalties or other payments to the author for the work. Critics of this approach, however, have charged that the quality of computer-made speech isn't high enough to match professional readers and that the approach sets a dangerous precedent for any TTS feature on an electronics device. As operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows include the feature for reading text aloud, their abilities could theoretically raise the same rights issues as with the Kindle 2. [via Wired]
Junior Member
Joined: Sep 2001
Confused
I dont understand. You pay for a book , wether you then read the ting or listen to the thing should be your right, you have paid for it.
I do understand that for a purely digital "audio" distribution file ie. a 2nd file purchased not to read but to listen to is a seperate issue. BUT really I think the ritten medium need to get over themselves and come to the same conclusion as MUSIC. Customers want to but a piece of music and listen to ir , buy a book and listen or read it when they want , where they want.