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His approach has been very damaging public relations for the Author's Guild. The industry is finally going through a major technology transformation and the authors need the public on their side. It comes down to treating the new technology as a threat that needs to be controlled or an opportunity to embrace.
I agree with him that TTS will eventually kill the existing audio book market but I think it's 15 to 25 years out. Fifteen years if the industry embraces it or 25 years if they fight it.
He is treating it as a threat that needs to be controlled and his arguments aren't logical. He's saying that arbitrary rights have been assigned to the exact same electronic text and the world must conform to them. From my viewpoint he might as well be saying that they signed contracts for the rights to the font sizes 8, 12 and 16 to Company A and the right to 6, 10, 14 to Company B so now your technology has to accommodate that. Oh and by the way in some case we signed contracts to the odd sized fonts to Company C. There's absolutely no difference in the content we're selling, these are virtual and arbitrary rights but deal with them. From my viewpoint if the companies signed contracts like this they are worth $0.
If he treated it as an opportunity he would talk to the TTS vendors to find out how the authors could work with them to make the technology better. As I said earlier they could jointly develop a standard to markup the text so the TTS technology can understand how the author expected the text to be presented. Things like who is speaking, were they angry, how angry were they, were they being naive or sarcastic. These are all things that the author knows but is very difficult for the technology to interpret. I suspect there are already proposed standards for this I'm just not aware of them.
If they jointly developed a standard for marking up the text with these properties and worked with the software tool vendors to add it to the author's tools then they can develop new rich text content with "enhanced real aloud technology" or something. Now they've developed new content, added value and have something that can justifiably be sold for a higher price. I think that it would be fairly easy to experiment with a simple set of attributes.
The consumer gets a better listening experience, the author's don't lose anything when the technology replaces the audiobooks and it's potentially more revenue.
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