Amazon Caves on Text-To-Speech

[Nate the great]

As you may know, there has been a public debate going on since 9 February over whether Amazon had the right to create the TTS ability of the K2. You can read what the Author's Guild has said here, and here. I just received this press release.

SEATTLE, Feb 27, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.

Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat.

Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.

Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.

I'm surprised. I thought Amazon had a solid position, both legal and contractual.

But there is an upside. There is an exception to the DMCA that allows for DRM removal of ebooks that have TTS ability disabled. The K2 jeopardized the exception because it had TTS for all ebooks. Now that it doesn't, I can legally remove DRM from my ebooks again. This is completely wrong.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

... I'm surprised. I thought Amazon had a solid position, both legal and contractual....

And they do:

"no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given."

I am assuming they've decided it's not worth alienating the content creators and publishers, so they will lock TTS for some titles.

Then it will be the market that decides if these would sell.

I already know which way I'll go.

[SpiderMatt]

Originally Posted by Sonist

And they do:

"no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given."

I am assuming they've decided it's not worth alienating the content creators and publishers, so they will lock TTS for some titles.

Then it will be the market that decides if these would sell.

I already know which way I'll go.

Agreed. But Nate's point about legally removing DRM from these e-books kind of sweetens the pot for me. I always remove DRM from my e-books anyway.

[Moejoe]

I'm not sure I'm understanding correctly, but has the net result of the Authors Guild outburst been to essentially allow us all to remove DRM from ebooks legally?

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I'm not sure I'm understanding correctly, but has the net result of the Authors Guild outburst been to essentially allow us all to remove DRM from ebooks legally?

Here is what the copyright office says:

4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

from:
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/index.html

So if a DRMed ebook can't be run through TTS software because of the DRM, you can legally remove it. The really cool part is that it doesn't matter why you want to remove the DRM. If a title is available only in eReader, you can remove the DRM. If it is available in MSReader but has the TTS disabled, you can remove the DRM.

The K2 threatened this becuase it had the vast majority of ebook available in the US, and it could play all of them on TTS.


EDIT:I was completely wrong on this.

If I had written the exception quoted above, I would have stated who it applied to and why. They did not because the limited nature of the exception is stated in the DMCA. Basically, you can only remove DRM from ebooks if you need to use TTS. If you are not adversely affected by TTS being disabled, you cannot remove DRM.

[Moejoe]

Seems like the only people who won out in this battle are the consumers (for once)

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Seems like the only people who won out in this battle are the consumers (for once)

Yep. Now you can remove the DRM from the AZW ebooks and play them on your K2. Heck, I was going to do that anyway.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Seems like the only people who won out in this battle are the consumers (for once)

Well, not really. Most consumers don't remove DRM and many don't even know a book they buy for their Kindle even has DRM on it. These consumers will find that this feature won't work for them and when they bought their eBook Reader they were promised it would.

Dale

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Well, not really. Most consumers don't remove DRM and many don't even know a book they buy for their Kindle even has DRM on it. These consumers will find that this feature won't work for them and when they bought their eBook Reader they were promised it would.

Dale

And they'll get angry, and a good portion of them will try to find out why, and that good portion will then discover the truth and tell their friends.

One of the reasons I fear that DRM is so prevalent in all forms of media is that consumers aren't advised properly about what it does, and what it prevents them from doing. But once they get stung by DRM there's no turning back. Nothing more galling than paying out money only to realise the product has been rendered useless by idiotic protection schemes or other market restricting techniques. My first experience of the ridiculousness of DRM/protection was with DVD. I imported a R1 DVD from America and couldn't play it on any of my players. A quick search, a few keypresses on my remote, and the region encoding on the DVD was stripped away.

DRM is redundant in all ways, apart from a false sense of security that it provides the content providers.

[Robotech_Master]

Here's my take on it at TeleRead.org.

[kilofox]

Probably explains the firmware update? http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40383

[Ervserver]

Has anyone noticed a book that has the TTS turned off?

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by Ervserver

Has anyone noticed a book that has the TTS turned off?

That would require actually using it.

About a paragraph of TTS is all most people who can see well enough to read instead can stand.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

But there is an upside. There is an exception to the DMCA that allows for DRM removal of ebooks that have TTS ability disabled. The K2 jeopardized the exception because it had TTS for all ebooks. Now that it doesn't, I can legally remove DRM from my ebooks again.

Only legally for those ebooks that do not allow TTS to work. The others are still the same gray area.

[astromusic]

Ahem.... can you give this clueless person a pointer on how one might go about removing DRM?

I was completely BUMMED out about this news and seething about Author's Guild, but this news cheers me up considerably!