Disability groups protest Authors Guild over Kindle text-to-speech

08 Apr

Posted by erikbowman as Uncategorized

The headquarters of the Authors Guild in New York City became a flash point for the debate over Amazon’s Kindle 2 electronic reader today. Disability groups including the National Federation of the Blind staged a protest outside the building, calling on the Guild to reverse its stance on Kindle’s text-to-speech feature, which reads e-books aloud. The Guild called the protest "unfortunate and unnecessary."

The Guild has criticized Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature, saying it encroaches on audio books without compensating copyright holders. That prompted Amazon to back down somewhat, saying it would allow authors and publishers to decide themselves whether to activate the read-aloud feature on individual titles. But the disability groups, which have organized themselves into a Reading Rights Coalition, are demanding full access to text-to-speech — saying it gives the visually impaired equal access to electronic books.

Following today’s protest, Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken responded with a statement that read, in part:

The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members’ economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can’t afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights.

Knowing how difficult the road ahead is for the already fragile economics of authorship, we are particularly troubled at how all this arose, with Amazon attempting to use authors’ audio rights to lengthen its lead in the fledgling e-book industry. We could not allow this rights grab to happen. Audio books are a billion dollar market, the rights for which are packaged separately from — and are far more valuable than — e-book rights.

Aiken added:

Today’s protest is unfortunate and unnecessary. We stand by our offer, first made to the Federation’s lawyer a month ago and repeated several times since, to negotiate in good faith to reach a solution for making in-print e-books accessible to everyone. We extend that same offer to any group representing the disabled.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind, said the coalition plans to make its case again at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books April 25 and 26.

[Photo courtesy National Federation of the Blind]

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and Newsvine’s Davidson: The newspaper medium is ‘obsolete’

Newsvine co-founder Mike Davidson doesn’t hold out much hope for daily newspapers, which is hardly newsworthy given the recent problems plaguing the industry. But Davidson’s remarks — made today at the University of Washington Foster School of Business lecture series in downtown Seattle — certainly drove that point home.

Asked by moderator Christine Chen whether there’s any future for newspapers, the 34-year-old Internet entrepreneur bluntly replied: "No, there isn’t. And there isn’t even a present, unfortunately."

That’s not to blame newspapers for the mess, which Davidson said employ a lot of smart people and do good work. They really got stuck in an old distribution model.

"It is not the P-I that failed. It is not The Seattle Times that’s failing. It is the medium of the newspaper that is obsolete," said Davidson, who sold Newsvine to MSNBC.com in October 2007. "The future is not so bright for newspaper companies, and the one reality that I think is the toughest to deal with is the concept that the news business is probably shrinking…. It is not not a growth business anymore. It is much more distributed."

Davidson didn’t let newspapers off the hook completely, noting that they failed to allow people in online communities to talk to one another. That’s something that Craigslist mastered, he said. And now money-losing newspapers are paying for that mistake.

"I think we may be a zero newspaper town quicker than any major city around," he said. "It is definitely going to be a domino effect…. The writing is on the wall and the writing has been on the wall for several years."

Of course, the flood of information now flowing through blogs, Twitter and online news publications has a downside. And it won’t be a substitute for some of the hard-hitting journalism performed by newspapers, an issue that Davidson said is one of the toughest to address.

He cited a recent investigation by The Seattle Times into snow removal policies during last December’s winter blast, a story that Davidson admitted that most bloggers would not have thought to pursue.

While community activists or bloggers might take up the cause, Davidson said some of the investigative style journalism will likely be lost. After all, not every story can be told in the 140 characters through Twitter.

An infrequent Twitter user, Davidson said that the online publishing tool is catching on because of ease of use and laziness. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

"We have so many inputs now that we are at risk at making ourselves dumber as a society instead of smarter," he said. "It reaches a certain point that you have so much information that you are looking at that you just aren’t paying enough attention to what you are reading."

When users select the news they don’t always choose the most important stories, with Davidson referencing the popularity of the Enumclaw bestiality story from four years ago.

During the Q&A session, I asked Davidson what he thought of asking people to pay for online content. Davidson said it’s a tough proposition, though he would consider paying a monthly fee for a "small basket" of his favorite blogs.

The other idea is that news organizations could charge for exclusive content. "In the last several years, mainstream media has almost over syndicated themselves," he said.

More on the changes in the newspaper industry from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who today told the Newspaper Association of America that the industry will have to make money through a combination of advertising, micropayments and online subscriptions.