You shall not curse the deaf nor place a stumbling block before the blind.
Leviticus 19:14

I realize it’s unfashionable to feel sorry for Random House, but I think they’re getting the rotten end of the stick for a problem not of their making.

You’ll recall that Amazon’s initiative to convert the texts of Kindle e-books to speech generated a furious response from authors and publishers because of potential infringement on their reserved commercial audio rights. Under threat of legal action, Amazon backed off, leaving the decision to speech-activate Kindle texts up to content owners. Many publishers opted out. Random House was one of them.

Now, The Reading Rights Coalition, representing more than 15 million visually challenged Americans, has censured Random House for denying audio service to its constituents. “When Random House turned off the text-to-speech function on all of its e-books for the Kindle 2,” declared Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, “it turned off access to this service for more than 15 million print-disabled Americans. The blind and other print-disabled readers have the right to purchase e-books using this service with text-to-speech enabled. Blocking text-to-speech prohibits access for print-disabled readers and is both reprehensible and discriminatory.” Maurer was joined by executives of Lighthouse International, American Association of People with Disabilities, National Spinal Cord Injury Association, American Council of the Blind and other organizations in denunciations of Random. A petition is being circulated.

It would be unspeakably callous to disregard the needs of the blind and reading-disabled. And that’s the point: book publishers have always been in the vanguard of industries sensitive to the needs of the visually challenged. Language guaranteeing to them free access to published books is a standard feature of every book contract I have ever seen. A recent Random House contract says, “Random House shall have the right to grant transcription or publication rights in any Work in Braille or other non-book formats specifically for the visually impaired without charge.” The subsidiary rights grant in a HarperCollins contract on my desk grants Harper “Braille, large-type and other editions for the handicapped (the Publisher may grant such rights to recognized non-profit organizations for the handicapped without charge and without payment to the Author).” I’m ready to bet that every one of the thousands of contracts in our agency’s files has similar language.

I don’t think the leadership of the Reading Rights Coalition is doing its members a favor by attacking publishers, who have been victimized by Amazon/Kindle’s audio initiative just as severely as the visually impaired. There is a line between a function intended for the disabled and one designed for fully sighted and literate. Amazon’s aggressive step across that line put publishers on the horns of a cruel dilemma: by withholding audio rights from Kindle they deny service to a genuinely needy population; but by enabling Kindle’s audio feature they deprive legitimate copyright holders of the opportunity to exploit a commercial right. They also incur liability: a publisher can be sued by authors whose commercial audio rights had been given away to Amazon. And because that threat of liability is ever-present to Random House and its brother and sister publishers, it’s not likely that petitions or humanitarian appeals (including to President Obama) will gain any traction.

What’s the answer? We must come up with a voice-enabling technology expressly targeted to the handicapped, and segregate it from commercial audio. That’s not a job for publishers. It’s a job for technologists, and we wish them godspeed in solving the problem.

Amazon should be in the forefront of those supporting such an initiative, because there are 15 million visually impaired individuals ready to buy a device that serves them what they need and are entitled to. If Amazon doesn’t or can’t do the job – well, there are a lot of e-book devices coming on stream, and the one that solves this audio dilemma will have a huge advantage and a ready-made market.

For the Coalition’s full statement click here.

Pictured: The HumanWare VictorReader Stream digital-audio player for the blind.

Richard Curtis

By advocating the limiting of the Kindle 2′s text-to-voice feature, the Authors Guild jumped out of the frying pan of angry audio publishers and into the fire of angry reading-disabled persons. The National Federation of the Blind staged a rally in front of the Guild’s Manhattan offices to protest the Guild’s recent position that the Kindle 2′s voice-output feature constituted a potential infringement on author copyrights and on the audio business.

The Guild, which has been second to none in its support of making books accessible to the blind, found itself over a barrel in leading the protest against the feature in the Kindle 2′s operating system that enables readers – those both with and without visual impairment – to listen to the e-book they are reading. Because Kindle’s voices sound, or at least have the potential to sound, like professional narrators employed in commercial audiobooks, Amazon’s move was like waving a red flag in the face of the audio industry, as well as co-opting the rights of authors to enter into commercial audiobook deals. We expressed our support for the Guild and we still do. However, representatives of the Blind and other reading-challenged persons took the Guild’s position to be an affront.

It seems fairly clear to us that the protesters misunderstood the Guild’s opposition to Kindle 2 and forgot how stalwart the organization has been on their behalf. The Guild therefore issued a statement clarifying its position and putting forth some excellent recommendations for changes in legislation, technology and book contracts. We reproduce it in full here and wish more power to the Guild in its passionate advocacy of the rights of the blind.

RC

Publishers Weekly reports that David Naggar is joining Amazon to become vice-president of Kindle Content. Naggar, former head of Random House Information and president of Random House’s audio group (and son of prominent literary agent Jean Naggar), will “be working with the team to continue building a massive selection of content in the Kindle Store.” Naggar got his digital feet wet as president of a startup called iAmplify.com, described by PW as providing a “subscription-based access to digital and audio content across a number of genres.”

Book people should greet this news enthusiastically. Given the love-hate relationship between traditional publishers and Amazon, Naggar’s move may help to push the dial a little closer to the “love” position. He brings great savvy, experience and the respect of book industry colleagues to a post that requires all three qualities as Kindle girds for challenges to its early hegemony as the e-reading device of choice. And his special skill-set in audio comes as Amazon licks its wounds after the book and audio industry thwarted its attempt to enable a text-to-voice feature that would have triggered a trade war and, undoubtedly, a major lawsuit.

We don’t know what Naggar’s mandate is, but if he wants to push that dial to full “Love” position he can start by offering a royalty on used books, one of Amazon’s most prosperous business practices but a thorn in the flesh of every right-thinking author and publisher. How about it, David?

Richard Curtis

Under pressure from authors, audio publishers and other audio rights-holders, Amazon pulled back from its initiative to convert the texts of Kindle e-books to speech without permission. The company declared that it is

“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.”

Amazon did not concede that its provocative act of enabling text-to-speech infringed on anybody’s audio rights. In fact it asserted that the “experimental text-to-speech feature is
legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.” That said, “Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

Whether Amazon did or did not have a leg to stand on, the high stakes of a possible rights infringement on the interests of a billion dollar audio industry all but guaranteed litigation. Though many opponents of Amazon’s text-to-speech function would prefer to do away with it altogether, they may have to live with the voluntary, book by book nature of Amazon’s revised position. Indeed, because of Federal disability mandates requiring the function to be embedded in e-books, a complete termination of text-to-speech might actually be unlawful. For now, calm has descended over Kindle City and Authors Guild and other opponents are withdrawing their tanks to the perimeter.

For background on the dispute you can click on our recent summary, and for details of Amazon’s concession, link to cnet’s coverage.

RC

The New York Times carries an op-ed article by Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr. with the provocative title The Kindle Swindle? The Guild has attacked Amazon over the Kindle feature enabling readers to listen to the texts of their Kindle books read by a computer voice.

The Guild’s position is that Amazon is not paying royalties for the text-to-speech versions, and that the Kindle may be infringing on audio rights reserved to authors, book publishers, or legitimate audio companies. E-Reads’ Michael Gaudet has commented extensively on the controversy and strongly recommends that interested parties sort this out through discussion and negotiation. If they don’t, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. The audio business is a billion dollar one, a sum worth going to court over.

“You may be thinking.” writes Blount, “that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading ‘Harry Potter’ or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version…And that sort of technology is improving all the time. I.B.M. has patented a computerized voice that is said to be almost indistinguishable from human ones. This voice is programmed to include ‘ums,’ ‘ers’ and sighs, to cough for attention, even to ‘shhh’ when interrupted.”

Author Guild has released a demo of a Kindle audio reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Any ums? Any ers? Judge for yourself, but if I’m Abe Lincoln I’m on the horn with my lawyer faster than you can say Jeff Bezos.

RC