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Originally Posted by starrigger
I blogged on my talk with Aiken
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Very informative post in the blog, though the one thing that I would take exception with is about audio being currently turned/on and off in ebooks.
That would be true if the books were in one (non-converted) drm'ed format, but otherwise it's just not true since you can extract the book to a text file and use a TTS engine - for example it is immaterial that a pdf has audio turned off since you can always extract the text if it's not drm'ed and these days pdf drm is smoke, the way lit or prc have been for a while.
Since my contention is that most e-books people have are not drm'ed (however they were obtained in first place), I think that argument is just RIAA silliness
The more cogent argument is the "convenience" one, the "channel" if you want, but considering that Audible is part of Amazon, why not think of the Kindle 2 TTS as free advertising for "real" audiobooks...
Regarding contracts and other legal stuff, it's an interesting issue but until it goes to court and precedent decisions are issued, I think that nobody truly knows if TTS is encompassed by audio-rights. There is a piece in Ars Technica discussing that and automatic translations here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-copyright.ars