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I see this as analogous to the ‘controversy’ over text-to-speech when Kindle first offered this feature. Eventually, some publishers blocked it (and still block it) on the theory that it hurt audiobook sales (despite any evidence — anecdotal or otherwise — for this then, or since), and even when there were no audiobooks to sell! DRM more generally (Adobe’s for example) also enforces this restriction. But very few people are prepared to read entire books with TTS engaged, unless they are vision impaired. And even if TTS is recorded to audio file, nobody would claim it is superior to professionally produced audiobook, at least not yet.
Indeed, screen readers (Amazon’s Voice View, Apple’s VoiceOver/SpeakScreen, Google’s TalkBack) are considered allowable exceptions and (at least for Amazon’s Kindle platform) do read out text without regard to publisher restrictions on TTS.
Here we’re being asked to believe that more than a very few people are going to consider this a substitute for actually having the full text available to page through, when they would otherwise purchase the ebook AND audiobook. Which is ludicrous.
Amazon could have promoted this as an ‘accessibility’ feature for people with hearing issues. And of course they could actually promote purchase of the ebook (‘did you know there’s this thing called Immersion Reading’?). And arguably, more people will be purchasing audiobooks if they know they can occasionally peek at text and use it to annotate and share, thereby promoting the book.
We don’t know how many publishers will dig in their heels over this, but it would be nice if enough of them didn’t so we can see for ourselves if the feature has value.
At the least we’ll see this for public domain books and KDP titles that already have audiobook companions.
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