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"...devalue the market for cross-format products, and harm Publishers, authors, and the consumers who enjoy and rely on books." Could someone explain the licen

"...devalue the market for cross-format products, and harm Publishers, authors, and the consumers who enjoy and rely on books." Could someone explain the licensing like I'm 5 that doesn't end up with "because publishers want more money" When I buy a book I am buying the story. The authors words on paper (well on digital ink). When I buy an audio book I am buying the authors words performed by a voice actor. I get why the audiobook is more. I'm paying for the author's story + actor. But I never understood why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. How are they doing anything but trying to charge me twice for the same story?

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Do they want more money, or just not to lose existing income?
- chii 7y ago
  those are the same things in essense. If their market is shrinking, they are losing "existing" income. If they use force to prevent this from happening, then it is the same as wanting more money.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    That’s a reasonable perspective.
Jonnax 7y ago
Different industries which have established themselves over decades. It's like software licencing. You buy a licence for the text, or the audio. It's why buying an MP3 doesn't entitle you to the Sheet Music.
- fnordsensei 7y ago
  For music, it can get really weird. One company can own a specific performance, a second the lyrics, and a third, the sheet music.
buro9 7y ago
When you buy a book you are buying an implementation of a story. And a company paid for the right to produce the implementations in that form, which is what you're covering in the purchase. When you purchased a book it didn't give you ownership to all other implementations of the story. You still must pay for a recording of a reading, a translated version, the story in a film, and so on. The right to make implementations is agreed by contract... Licensed... And restricted to the form of an implementation and usually a legal/geographic domain. If you purchased the right to make implementations in clay tablets, you would not have the inherent right to produce a shadow puppet version too. For that you would need another license from the author (typically via their publisher).
- chii 7y ago
  information is information. If i purchased a video on casset tape, i ought to be allowed to produce a clay-tablet version (at my own expense, and only for my own use).
  - robjan 7y ago
    Your analogy would mean that you would have to transcribe the audiobook for your own personal use. That would probably be fair use but you probably wouldn't want to do that.
    - chii 7y ago
      using a tool to transcribe (for example, a tool provided by amazon) is the same as doing it myself.
      - yorwba 7y ago
        But is Amazon actually providing the tool, or just its output? Could I use it to transcribe any audiobook I want, even if it isn't available via Audible? Because otherwise it's not you doing it for your personal use, but Amazon redistributing copyrighted content.
martin-adams 7y ago
I would love a version of the audible subscription to include the kindle version. Paying multiple times for the same information doesn't feel right to me. Sure, everyone in the chain should be fairly compensated.
dagw 7y ago
that doesn't end up with "because publishers want more money" Well no, because publishers (and authors) do want more money. When I buy a book I am buying the story. This is where your analysis goes wrong. But I never understood why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. For the same reason you're not entitled to a free (or even discount) paperback if you buy the hardback, or why I can't return the paperback I dropped in the bathtub for new copy. You're not licensing the story, you're buying a specific implementation of that story. Furthermore different companies have bought the rights to different versions of that story in different mediums, and they all want to earn their money back.
- chrisan 7y ago
  > For the same reason you're not entitled to a free (or even discount) paperback if you buy the hardback, or why I can't return the paperback I dropped in the bathtub for new copy. I think I need something better than that. You are talking about 2 physical items, I don't think anyone would argue just because you buy 1 product off the shelf doesn't mean you are entitled to the rest of the shelf An audio book requires author, editor, publisher, actor, distributor A digital book requires the same minus actor Where as a physical book requires the same + printer, binder, possibly artists, typesetter, shipper In this case the audiobook and digital book have same distributor, amazon Say I want to whispersync The Way of Kings. I already own the audiobook but now I have to buy the Kindle version for full price, which is $9.99 (I double checked in a private tab to make sure amazon wasnt giving any discounts) > Furthermore different companies have bought the rights to different versions of that story in different mediums, and they all want to earn their money back. How am I not paying for the same thing twice? If there is some other entity involved I wouldn't mind paying a small difference for their service to bring it to that medium. Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium?
  - danso 7y ago
    > Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium? I'm a little confused, but who are the people who are getting "paid twice for contributing nothing to another medium"?
cbhl 7y ago
"cross-format products" is basically their way of saying "talking book as an app". You can find lots of these on the App Store; in the days of yore they were also distributed on CD-ROM (as a separate purchase from the corresponding book and cassette book). One of my favorites is the app for "Moo Baa La La La" which lets you tap on individual animals in addition to the "read-along" mode. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moo-baa-la-la-la-sandra-boynton/id431302275 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moo-baa-la-la-la-sandra-boynto... So, you could say that this ML product is putting certain software developers out of business.
danso 7y ago
Putting aside the publishers' financial motives, it doesn't sit quite right with me to think of and reduce the value and purpose of the book in text form as being completely subordinate and subsumed by its audiobook version, to the point that the text can be seen as nothing more than an inferior fallback mode not even worth charging for. Of course I agree that distributing a book as text is basically nothing compared to producing and distributing audio. Making an audiobook (for the most part, I assume) requires the the book text exists in the first place, so the book text is a sunk cost in terms of production. But it doesn't make economic sense, because a book in e-text format has actual value, and continues to have value and utility even if you end up buying the audio version too. As long as an e-text format has value, how could the market justify reducing its value to 0 when it's part of an audiobook purchase? Wouldn't the price for all audiobooks (that now come bundled with text for free) end up being increased across the board? People still value the experience of text, enough to be satisfied with paying for text and text alone. Would the market be better if e-text prices stayed the same, and all audiobooks were bundled with text for "free", at a higher price? Sure, if you're the type to buy both audio and text. But not if you frequently buy just audiobooks and are now forced to pay a premium for the bundled text version. Thinking of real-world factors, I'm assuming that the pay structure and system for audiobooks is different than it is for text. If a writer trades audio rights/royalties for better royalties from print/ebooks, giving away text with audio will hurt their bottom line.
- hrktb 7y ago
  > text form as being completely subordinate and subsumed by its audiobook version Close to this, an other angle is to see the text version as source, and the audiobook as a representation. The source having more information, or allowing for more representation has a real value. The same way raw files/original film in photography have a different value from a print. To go on with the analogy, historically we pay for photographic prints and rarely for the raw file (or the raw file would cost more than individual prints). And there is the same debate, when a photographer shoots a wedding and the couple didn't negotiate the raw files, they can be surprised they don't get them by default, even when paying for the print. I think in general the source/original material should be included in the sale of the representation, and the whole priced accordingly, but I get that it's not how the publishers see it, or how some customer would bargain to get only the cheapest part, and that behaviour becoming the least common denominator.
paulcole 7y ago
> When I buy a book I am buying the story. This is 100% not what you’re buying. You’re buying a book or an audiobook. Could be 200 blank pages or 10 hours of white noise.
scarface74 7y ago
The publishers have been strong armed by Amazon for well over a decade. Apple was sure and forced to settle by the DOJ for giving publishers more control over what they could charge and it strengthened the hand of Amazon.
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gibspaulding 7y ago
In software terms, by buying a book you are purchasing a (transferrable) license to read a story. An audiobook is a (generally nontransferrable) license to hear a story. As far as copyright is concerned those are different things, so since publishers do want more money, why not charge twice.
castlecrasher2 7y ago
>But I never understood why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. The opposite is also true, that Amazon removed and no longer allows text-to-speech for Kindle books, except for certain devices that advertised the feature like one of the Kindles and the Fire Phone. I use my wife's old Fire Phone to do this, and it works rather well.
- rstupek 7y ago
  I believe the publishers sued Amazon to have them remove that feature
Shivetya 7y ago
My quandary, I have three hundred plus music CDs I ripped years and years ago that I really do not need the physical media. Yet if I give up that media I am likely not legally allowed to keep the ripped versions. Instead of ripping it would be ever so nice to scan the barcode to gain access to digital versions but I understand the issue, I paid for physical copies and for the production and distribution of those, I did not pay for someone to host and provide for me the means to download the copies. Now some movies do come with a digital version which you can download separately and never use the physical media. So I have a dresser drawer filled with CDs I had not used for five if not more years. However I do have to say, I never will lose access to that music nor the physical books I own which is more than I can say for stuff I purchase digitally through Amazon or Apple
- friedegg 7y ago
  The funny thing is that Amazon actually did this several years ago. Many of the CDs I had purchased via Amazon were added to my Amazon Music collection as mp3s, including CDs I purchased as gifts and gave away.
- whiddershins 7y ago
  IANAL but I can’t see why you really need to keep the physical CDs
nickjj 7y ago
If you bought a movie (let's say a DVD), does that mean you should be able to get the book for free (even in ebook form)? IMO both are completely separate products. It should be up to the publisher on whether or not they want to bundle the text version for free with their audio book (some do).
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  If you bought a book, does that mean you should be able to read it out loud to your children for FREE?!?!?
  - nickjj 7y ago
    That's a tricky one. I'm not a copyright lawyer. My spidey sense tells me it's probably in violation but it's one of those things that are so close to impossible to enforce that no one would ever get caught, plus if they somehow did they caught (their evil genius 5 year old planted a camera in the room, recorded it and sent it to the publisher) nothing bad would come of it because any publisher who sued a parent into ruins over reading a book to their kid would probably be outcast from society if the media got a hold of that story. Now, if you recorded that reading alone and put it on Youtube, I imagine that would for sure be a clear cut violation even if you didn't monetize the video. The same goes for reading it out loud in a public place. The only real difference there is you're no longer in the privacy of your own home and there's concrete proof of the violation in a much different context than reading to your kid. Now you're distributing copyright material. I had something similar come up with one of my video courses. Someone wanted to buy a single license of my course and then teach the course live to a bunch of high school students in Africa. They asked me if they could do this with only 1 license even though a bunch of students would be consuming the content. I said sure no problem and wished them the best and to ask me any questions if there were any issues. I guess that's one benefit of publishing things on your own. You can treat these things on a case by case basis.
- UI_at_80x24 7y ago
  That I think is exactly the point that we should be 'fighting' for. I bought $medium, and I want to consume it however I want. I didn't "request a license" to use it how they want me to. For Example, take a Stephen King book. If I bought a Stephen King hardcover book; I can use it as a paper-weight, bug-killer, timeless tome to read under the covers, or Other. If I bought the DVD movie, I can play it for personal enjoyment where-ever I want, however I want. I can also just listen to the audio output, or mute it and just have the video playing. I can consume it in anyway that I want. If I am buying an e-book, the options and methods of consumption change are different but should not be limited. If I ask my partner to read that hardcover book to me at night the Publisher doesn't get to charge me addition money for it. There have been text-to-speech computer programs going back DECADES. If I had Sound-Blaster 'SAY.exe' [1] read to me the ebook that I bought NOBODY would be crying over "you are stealing our monies!" The modern text-to-speech is nothing more then SAYv2019. If I don't want text-to-speech, I'll but the Audio-book and hear it performed by a real-person. [1]https://ibm-pc.org/manuals/other/creative/SoundBlaster15.PDF https://ibm-pc.org/manuals/other/creative/SoundBlaster15.PDF - page 25
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regulation_d 7y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that the rights that the publishers are exercising here are the same rights initially possessed by the writer, before they transfer them to the publisher. So it's about the publishers, yes, but before that it's about protecting the creators. > I get why the audiobook is more. I'm paying for the author's story + actor. But I never understood why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. The audiobook isn't just "more", it's technically a separate work altogether. The audiobook producer will acquire a license to use the book in its own work. Presumably the consideration for the license is either straight up cash or some cut of the profits from the sales of the audiobook, or some combination of the two. But copyright is not just one right, it's a bundle of rights. And most likely, when the publisher licenses use of the book for creation of the audiobook, they are (probably explicitly) not also licensing rights of distribution of the text of the book. So disseminating the text of the original work would be a violation of the publisher's rights.
adrr 7y ago
Here's something even more crazy. You can buy an ebook but you can't use a text to speech engine on the actual text.
corodra 7y ago
I mean, let's put it in these terms and see how you feel. Write a book. Your average book that reaches shelves takes 4 to 8 months to write. About 2 months for the first draft and roughly 4 to 10 rewrites depending on the author's quality. Then it goes to a publisher that hires an editor to comb the book a few times over. Discussing aspects of the book and a decent amount of rewriting from here as well. Then theres cover art. Oh and typesetting/formatting for actual publication. About a good year's worth of work along with many people for one book. So, go ahead, do that all for free and dont feel salty when some other company takes your story, exactly word for word, makes easy money off of it and gives you nothing. Just saying. Rent and food isn't paid with like buttons, reddit karma, hn upvotes and hugs/kisses.
- rsstack 7y ago
  But the author, the editor and the cover artist are still getting paid: people are buying audio books for money. The only people who don't get paid are those who did print formatting - but their work isn't being offered here, as Audible is only showing captions and not full pages.
breakintheweb 7y ago
I'd imagine the real reason for the complaint is that the royalty structure is more lucrative for the publishers and/or authors for books vs audiobooks.
cronix 7y ago
And if the story was made into a movie at some point, they're screwing you by not throwing that in as well? What about other languages? The product isn't the story by itself.
logfromblammo 7y ago
When you buy a print book, you are buying a physical license token for a copyrighted work, bundled with a single copy of that work. The license is attached to the copy. These are actually separable. If you remove the cover from a book, you are destroying the license token, without necessarily destroying the [now unlicensed] copy. This is something various entities in the book industry may do, to refund unsold copies from the distributor without incurring return shipping, warehousing, or handling charges. Instead of sending it back, the book is rendered unsellable by removing the cover with the ISBN on it, the paper is tossed in the trash, and nobody gets paid for the unsold copy. You can theoretically fish the pages out of the trash and read the book, but that's now technically piracy, because the copy is unlicensed. If you rip the cover off of a book you bought yourself, no big deal. You still have the license, because you bought it, but then you can't resell your copy, because the license is no longer embodied in a physical token attached to the copy. You can't prove you have the license, and any potential buyer couldn't be certain that you transferred it to them. For an audio-book on physical media, when you buy it, you buy the license implicitly attached to the copy. But since copyright is a mess, a recording of audio is a different copyright from the material used to generate the audio. An audio-book of Jeremy Irons reading a story has a different copyright as an audio-book of Bobcat Goldthwait reading the same story. You're not licensing the story itself, but a specific recording of the story. It's the same reason why a piece of music can be in the public domain, while a recording of it made by the FooBar Ensemble in 1991 can still be copyrighted. That theory of copyright is also how museums and collections try to claim copyright on digitizations of visual art that has long been public domain. There are a lot of tests about "sufficiently transformative" and "slavish copy" and whatnot. There's also a lot of money in ensuring that cross-media copyrights remain separated. From the publisher perspective, someone has a license for an audio recording. They probably also sell licenses for print copies, and licenses for e-books. And these are all sold individually, not as a bundle, because they are allowed by law to treat all these as separate works. From the consumer perspective, buying the audio recording is implicitly licensing both the specific recording and the work on which it was based, because otherwise, how could one possibly legally enjoy the content of that recording? So the consumer considers it perfectly acceptable to transform the format of what they believe they have licensed. I paid; this copy is mine now; I can do with it as I please. Parent post reinforces this. "I'm paying for the author's story + actor." But you're not. You licensed a copy of a recording, period. It's a derivative work, and you're piggybacking on the recording-owner's licensing of the original story, that gives them the right to make an audio-book. This confusion is not the consumer's fault. It arises from the non-intuitive cross-media parts of copyright law. It arises from the publishers and distributors of copyrighted works exploiting the ambiguity between buying a license and buying a copy. They would dearly like to have their cake, and eat it too. When people buy cakes, and then eat them (as one does with cakes) they get upset, because they sincerely believe that selling a cake and selling the right to eat a cake are completely different things. If they choose the non-transferable individual licensing model, they can no longer sell the same work to the same person multiple times. If I lose my file, I still have the license, and I can either demand a fresh download from the distributor or acquire one from another source without being considered a pirate. If they choose the license-attached-to-copy model, they can no longer capture the resale market. I can read or listen to my book and then resell it to someone else. What they want, but should not have, is a revocable non-transferable license attached to a single copy, so that if I buy a copy, and lose it, I still have to buy another copy, but if I then locate my original copy again, I can't resell it or get a refund for it. That model is worth more money to them, in their estimation. In my opinion, the publisher argument is bullshit. But it is founded in law. The law happens to be an ass. So they will likely win, until a federal appellate judge decides that they want their public service career to be destroyed by Disney et al.
balls187 7y ago
> How are they doing anything but trying to charge me twice for the same story? That's essentially what is happening, but that's not the onus for the copyright law. Standard IANAL caveat. The law is set to protect and encourage content creators by clearly defining what is copyrighted work, and how that copyrighted work can be used. > why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. Speculation, but it could be that publishers haven't figured out the simple economics of rolling the cost into the price of an audio book, or that publishing deals with authors prevent that type of bundling.
- electrograv 7y ago
  Related scenario: Imagine I sold a digital image (artwork). Imagine I sell two versions, each licensed separately (if you want both, you have to buy both): One is a full color image, and the other is a grayscale image. If you display the color image on a black-and-white monitor, you will be seeing something virtually identical to the grayscale version. By the logic I'm seeing here against Amazon, it would therefore be considered copyright infringement to sell black-and-white monitors?
  - rsstack 7y ago
    I love this example. I can understand why the audio version isn't included for free with the text version: the voice artist had to work 40~50 hours to create it, akin to the coloring artist in your example. But the reverse doesn't make sense. When I buy an audio book, I'm already paying both for the contents and for the execution: surely the contents were already paid for.
  - balls187 7y ago
    > black-and-white monitors Don't know. But is it similar to DeCSS technology and the MPAA. B&W Monitors could be argued to have multiple purposes, a side-effect is showing copyrighted images. I'm not fully informed as to what Amazon is doing, but if their technology is being applied specifically to create digital text versions of Audio Books, then it could be argued in a similar vein as DeCSS, which was argued to be necessary to provide "backups" of physical media. It could also be argued that Amazon is used legal maneuvering for a future showdown in which they can argue the effort to create digital text books is minuscule and thus drive the market price down Again, IANAL.
ergothus 7y ago
Other responses have tried to summarize WHAT is happening, but not as much as the why (or at least, the direct why as opposed to the handwavey "encourage innovation" why). For that, look to the past before copyright was a thing. Sure, there was the immediate result of when you put out a book others would copy the text (sometimes poorly). But another huge issues was _translations_. If you put out your book in, say, English, that meant you had a fairly small market. Those with the money for books and the background knowledge and interest in your topic were probably among the smaller well-off classes in several countries. Translations of a hot title were big money - and they'd be done, probably by others, and probably not as you (the author) would like. Thus, while the first copyrights were "don't copy the text", derivative works like translations were soon added. And because other languages mean other countries, there was an incentive to create international agreements, and this led to modern copyright. Arguably, all of the above are pretty decent reasons for the copyright protections we have. Consumers benefit because creators can expect to be paid for their work, and because creators are more likely to focus on quality than just getting it out first (particularly on translations). In that light, the argument that a speech-to-text translation requires permission makes some sense, at least legally. One could even argue that the copyright-holders (publishers, in this case) have a reason to not want a poor speech-to-text translation to ruin the reception of their works. Of course, this falls down when the publishers are preventing purchasers from making use of such services even when those purchasers are aware of the source of the translation, and any motive other than greed falls away when the publisher wants to be paid a second time. But the publishers aren't coming at this from nowhere, it's an existing, long-present concept. Arguably laws should change. Alternatively, consumers could demand changes in behavior (I have low expectations of that, but that's the theory).
excursionist 7y ago
The whole idea of copyright is unsound, so arguing about it's 'intricacies' is pretty pointless. Garbage in, garbage out.
whiddershins 7y ago
In true ELIF: Copyright = right to make a copy
vorotato 7y ago
Hard to move too far forwards without acknowledging that copyright law's constructions are deeply divorced from the public's values.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
I'd have to check but I'm not so sure you're buying, in the traditional sense, either of them. In modern legal terms, you are paying a fee for the rights to access that work in that format. It used to be you'd purchase a print book, you'd own it, and you could do whatever you wanted with it (e.g., resell it, burn it). That's not the case anymore. You can't resell it, not because of the format, but because you don't own it in the first place. I'm not a legal expert, and I know it might sound like I'm parsing words, but I feel there's some validity to my 50k feet assessment.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Unfortunately, even five year olds realize that the reasoning they use doesn't make sense. I gave a short talk on the economics of information and started with a very similar example which was this; Given that 3 ounces of ink and 200 pages of nice 20lb paper, bound with sewing and combines with a cardboard cover into a book costs roughly $3 in reasonable quantities, costs $20 when the ink is used to print J.K. Rowlings story of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Clearly the same package with my scribbling about wizards and magic would likely not even be valued at enough to cover the $3 printing cost :-). So it is clear that the information has an intrinsic value, but what is less clear is how it develops that value and how much of the value can be captured. The book publishers have gone down this road before[1]. 10 years ago the first 'text to speech' features came out in Kindle and Amazon backed down. Ten years later the Kindle is in a stronger place, so Amazon is perhaps inclined to not back down this time. What I find particularly amusing, is that publishers, when asked back in '09 if it was "Okay" for parents to read their books aloud to their children, they agreed but felt reading aloud to a group of children (as a teacher might do), or to a group of people unrelated to you, was a violation of their commercial rights which unfortunately they couldn't do anything about. Not so with the Kindle, which is standing in here as the reader, that gives them someone to sue. As technology gives people the ability to put information 'goods' in a real goods market framework (hard to reproduce, Etc.) the owner of those goods exploit those capabilities and litigate anything that would damage their capability to do so. Personally, I think it is a matter of time before the economics of information become more mainstream in their understanding much like the changes that allow people to reason about "service work" in discussions of GDP. But it is going to take a while. I look forward to reading papers that talk about economies working with goods, services, and information as their drivers of economic activity. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090227/1759173928.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090227/1759173928.shtml
ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
You're not entitled to a sheet music when going to a concert either.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Ok but explain why in a way that doesn't end up with "because publishers want more money"
ineedasername 7y ago
Forget about the philosophical "because you didn't buy that" or the various decent counter arguments. What it comes down to is that publishers purchase very narrow licenses of an author's output. One may specifically buy print rights, and only print rights for a specific geographical region like English USA. Or just the audio rights for a region. The same publisher often does not own both print and audio. So the big publishers that deal mostly in print get very defensive when sales of a copy they had no part in might eat some of the sales they might otherwise get. That's what you see in this case.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago

Do they want more money, or just not to lose existing income?

chii 7y ago
those are the same things in essense. If their market is shrinking, they are losing "existing" income. If they use force to prevent this from happening, then it is the same as wanting more money.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  That’s a reasonable perspective.

Jonnax 7y ago

Different industries which have established themselves over decades. It's like software licencing. You buy a licence for the text, or the audio. It's why buying an MP3 doesn't entitle you to the Sheet Music.

fnordsensei 7y ago
For music, it can get really weird. One company can own a specific performance, a second the lyrics, and a third, the sheet music.

buro9 7y ago

When you buy a book you are buying an implementation of a story. And a company paid for the right to produce the implementations in that form, which is what you're covering in the purchase. When you purchased a book it didn't give you ownership to all other implementations of the story. You still must pay for a recording of a reading, a translated version, the story in a film, and so on. The right to make implementations is agreed by contract... Licensed... And restricted to the form of an implementation and usually a legal/geographic domain. If you purchased the right to make implementations in clay tablets, you would not have the inherent right to produce a shadow puppet version too. For that you would need another license from the author (typically via their publisher).

chii 7y ago
information is information. If i purchased a video on casset tape, i ought to be allowed to produce a clay-tablet version (at my own expense, and only for my own use).
- robjan 7y ago
  Your analogy would mean that you would have to transcribe the audiobook for your own personal use. That would probably be fair use but you probably wouldn't want to do that.
  - chii 7y ago
    using a tool to transcribe (for example, a tool provided by amazon) is the same as doing it myself.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      But is Amazon actually providing the tool, or just its output? Could I use it to transcribe any audiobook I want, even if it isn't available via Audible? Because otherwise it's not you doing it for your personal use, but Amazon redistributing copyrighted content.

martin-adams 7y ago

I would love a version of the audible subscription to include the kindle version. Paying multiple times for the same information doesn't feel right to me. Sure, everyone in the chain should be fairly compensated.

dagw 7y ago

that doesn't end up with "because publishers want more money" Well no, because publishers (and authors) do want more money. When I buy a book I am buying the story. This is where your analysis goes wrong. But I never understood why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. For the same reason you're not entitled to a free (or even discount) paperback if you buy the hardback, or why I can't return the paperback I dropped in the bathtub for new copy. You're not licensing the story, you're buying a specific implementation of that story. Furthermore different companies have bought the rights to different versions of that story in different mediums, and they all want to earn their money back.

chrisan 7y ago
> For the same reason you're not entitled to a free (or even discount) paperback if you buy the hardback, or why I can't return the paperback I dropped in the bathtub for new copy. I think I need something better than that. You are talking about 2 physical items, I don't think anyone would argue just because you buy 1 product off the shelf doesn't mean you are entitled to the rest of the shelf An audio book requires author, editor, publisher, actor, distributor A digital book requires the same minus actor Where as a physical book requires the same + printer, binder, possibly artists, typesetter, shipper In this case the audiobook and digital book have same distributor, amazon Say I want to whispersync The Way of Kings. I already own the audiobook but now I have to buy the Kindle version for full price, which is $9.99 (I double checked in a private tab to make sure amazon wasnt giving any discounts) > Furthermore different companies have bought the rights to different versions of that story in different mediums, and they all want to earn their money back. How am I not paying for the same thing twice? If there is some other entity involved I wouldn't mind paying a small difference for their service to bring it to that medium. Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium?
- danso 7y ago
  > Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium? I'm a little confused, but who are the people who are getting "paid twice for contributing nothing to another medium"?

cbhl 7y ago

"cross-format products" is basically their way of saying "talking book as an app". You can find lots of these on the App Store; in the days of yore they were also distributed on CD-ROM (as a separate purchase from the corresponding book and cassette book). One of my favorites is the app for "Moo Baa La La La" which lets you tap on individual animals in addition to the "read-along" mode. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moo-baa-la-la-la-sandra-boynton/id431302275 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moo-baa-la-la-la-sandra-boynto... So, you could say that this ML product is putting certain software developers out of business.

danso 7y ago

Putting aside the publishers' financial motives, it doesn't sit quite right with me to think of and reduce the value and purpose of the book in text form as being completely subordinate and subsumed by its audiobook version, to the point that the text can be seen as nothing more than an inferior fallback mode not even worth charging for. Of course I agree that distributing a book as text is basically nothing compared to producing and distributing audio. Making an audiobook (for the most part, I assume) requires the the book text exists in the first place, so the book text is a sunk cost in terms of production. But it doesn't make economic sense, because a book in e-text format has actual value, and continues to have value and utility even if you end up buying the audio version too. As long as an e-text format has value, how could the market justify reducing its value to 0 when it's part of an audiobook purchase? Wouldn't the price for all audiobooks (that now come bundled with text for free) end up being increased across the board? People still value the experience of text, enough to be satisfied with paying for text and text alone. Would the market be better if e-text prices stayed the same, and all audiobooks were bundled with text for "free", at a higher price? Sure, if you're the type to buy both audio and text. But not if you frequently buy just audiobooks and are now forced to pay a premium for the bundled text version. Thinking of real-world factors, I'm assuming that the pay structure and system for audiobooks is different than it is for text. If a writer trades audio rights/royalties for better royalties from print/ebooks, giving away text with audio will hurt their bottom line.

hrktb 7y ago
> text form as being completely subordinate and subsumed by its audiobook version Close to this, an other angle is to see the text version as source, and the audiobook as a representation. The source having more information, or allowing for more representation has a real value. The same way raw files/original film in photography have a different value from a print. To go on with the analogy, historically we pay for photographic prints and rarely for the raw file (or the raw file would cost more than individual prints). And there is the same debate, when a photographer shoots a wedding and the couple didn't negotiate the raw files, they can be surprised they don't get them by default, even when paying for the print. I think in general the source/original material should be included in the sale of the representation, and the whole priced accordingly, but I get that it's not how the publishers see it, or how some customer would bargain to get only the cheapest part, and that behaviour becoming the least common denominator.

paulcole 7y ago

> When I buy a book I am buying the story. This is 100% not what you’re buying. You’re buying a book or an audiobook. Could be 200 blank pages or 10 hours of white noise.

scarface74 7y ago

The publishers have been strong armed by Amazon for well over a decade. Apple was sure and forced to settle by the DOJ for giving publishers more control over what they could charge and it strengthened the hand of Amazon.

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gibspaulding 7y ago

In software terms, by buying a book you are purchasing a (transferrable) license to read a story. An audiobook is a (generally nontransferrable) license to hear a story. As far as copyright is concerned those are different things, so since publishers do want more money, why not charge twice.

castlecrasher2 7y ago

>But I never understood why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. The opposite is also true, that Amazon removed and no longer allows text-to-speech for Kindle books, except for certain devices that advertised the feature like one of the Kindles and the Fire Phone. I use my wife's old Fire Phone to do this, and it works rather well.

rstupek 7y ago
I believe the publishers sued Amazon to have them remove that feature

Shivetya 7y ago

My quandary, I have three hundred plus music CDs I ripped years and years ago that I really do not need the physical media. Yet if I give up that media I am likely not legally allowed to keep the ripped versions. Instead of ripping it would be ever so nice to scan the barcode to gain access to digital versions but I understand the issue, I paid for physical copies and for the production and distribution of those, I did not pay for someone to host and provide for me the means to download the copies. Now some movies do come with a digital version which you can download separately and never use the physical media. So I have a dresser drawer filled with CDs I had not used for five if not more years. However I do have to say, I never will lose access to that music nor the physical books I own which is more than I can say for stuff I purchase digitally through Amazon or Apple

friedegg 7y ago
The funny thing is that Amazon actually did this several years ago. Many of the CDs I had purchased via Amazon were added to my Amazon Music collection as mp3s, including CDs I purchased as gifts and gave away.
whiddershins 7y ago
IANAL but I can’t see why you really need to keep the physical CDs

nickjj 7y ago

If you bought a movie (let's say a DVD), does that mean you should be able to get the book for free (even in ebook form)? IMO both are completely separate products. It should be up to the publisher on whether or not they want to bundle the text version for free with their audio book (some do).

jrochkind1 7y ago
If you bought a book, does that mean you should be able to read it out loud to your children for FREE?!?!?
- nickjj 7y ago
  That's a tricky one. I'm not a copyright lawyer. My spidey sense tells me it's probably in violation but it's one of those things that are so close to impossible to enforce that no one would ever get caught, plus if they somehow did they caught (their evil genius 5 year old planted a camera in the room, recorded it and sent it to the publisher) nothing bad would come of it because any publisher who sued a parent into ruins over reading a book to their kid would probably be outcast from society if the media got a hold of that story. Now, if you recorded that reading alone and put it on Youtube, I imagine that would for sure be a clear cut violation even if you didn't monetize the video. The same goes for reading it out loud in a public place. The only real difference there is you're no longer in the privacy of your own home and there's concrete proof of the violation in a much different context than reading to your kid. Now you're distributing copyright material. I had something similar come up with one of my video courses. Someone wanted to buy a single license of my course and then teach the course live to a bunch of high school students in Africa. They asked me if they could do this with only 1 license even though a bunch of students would be consuming the content. I said sure no problem and wished them the best and to ask me any questions if there were any issues. I guess that's one benefit of publishing things on your own. You can treat these things on a case by case basis.
UI_at_80x24 7y ago
That I think is exactly the point that we should be 'fighting' for. I bought $medium, and I want to consume it however I want. I didn't "request a license" to use it how they want me to. For Example, take a Stephen King book. If I bought a Stephen King hardcover book; I can use it as a paper-weight, bug-killer, timeless tome to read under the covers, or Other. If I bought the DVD movie, I can play it for personal enjoyment where-ever I want, however I want. I can also just listen to the audio output, or mute it and just have the video playing. I can consume it in anyway that I want. If I am buying an e-book, the options and methods of consumption change are different but should not be limited. If I ask my partner to read that hardcover book to me at night the Publisher doesn't get to charge me addition money for it. There have been text-to-speech computer programs going back DECADES. If I had Sound-Blaster 'SAY.exe' [1] read to me the ebook that I bought NOBODY would be crying over "you are stealing our monies!" The modern text-to-speech is nothing more then SAYv2019. If I don't want text-to-speech, I'll but the Audio-book and hear it performed by a real-person. [1]https://ibm-pc.org/manuals/other/creative/SoundBlaster15.PDF https://ibm-pc.org/manuals/other/creative/SoundBlaster15.PDF - page 25

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regulation_d 7y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that the rights that the publishers are exercising here are the same rights initially possessed by the writer, before they transfer them to the publisher. So it's about the publishers, yes, but before that it's about protecting the creators. > I get why the audiobook is more. I'm paying for the author's story + actor. But I never understood why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. The audiobook isn't just "more", it's technically a separate work altogether. The audiobook producer will acquire a license to use the book in its own work. Presumably the consideration for the license is either straight up cash or some cut of the profits from the sales of the audiobook, or some combination of the two. But copyright is not just one right, it's a bundle of rights. And most likely, when the publisher licenses use of the book for creation of the audiobook, they are (probably explicitly) not also licensing rights of distribution of the text of the book. So disseminating the text of the original work would be a violation of the publisher's rights.

adrr 7y ago

Here's something even more crazy. You can buy an ebook but you can't use a text to speech engine on the actual text.

corodra 7y ago

I mean, let's put it in these terms and see how you feel. Write a book. Your average book that reaches shelves takes 4 to 8 months to write. About 2 months for the first draft and roughly 4 to 10 rewrites depending on the author's quality. Then it goes to a publisher that hires an editor to comb the book a few times over. Discussing aspects of the book and a decent amount of rewriting from here as well. Then theres cover art. Oh and typesetting/formatting for actual publication. About a good year's worth of work along with many people for one book. So, go ahead, do that all for free and dont feel salty when some other company takes your story, exactly word for word, makes easy money off of it and gives you nothing. Just saying. Rent and food isn't paid with like buttons, reddit karma, hn upvotes and hugs/kisses.

rsstack 7y ago
But the author, the editor and the cover artist are still getting paid: people are buying audio books for money. The only people who don't get paid are those who did print formatting - but their work isn't being offered here, as Audible is only showing captions and not full pages.

breakintheweb 7y ago

I'd imagine the real reason for the complaint is that the royalty structure is more lucrative for the publishers and/or authors for books vs audiobooks.

cronix 7y ago

And if the story was made into a movie at some point, they're screwing you by not throwing that in as well? What about other languages? The product isn't the story by itself.

logfromblammo 7y ago

When you buy a print book, you are buying a physical license token for a copyrighted work, bundled with a single copy of that work. The license is attached to the copy. These are actually separable. If you remove the cover from a book, you are destroying the license token, without necessarily destroying the [now unlicensed] copy. This is something various entities in the book industry may do, to refund unsold copies from the distributor without incurring return shipping, warehousing, or handling charges. Instead of sending it back, the book is rendered unsellable by removing the cover with the ISBN on it, the paper is tossed in the trash, and nobody gets paid for the unsold copy. You can theoretically fish the pages out of the trash and read the book, but that's now technically piracy, because the copy is unlicensed. If you rip the cover off of a book you bought yourself, no big deal. You still have the license, because you bought it, but then you can't resell your copy, because the license is no longer embodied in a physical token attached to the copy. You can't prove you have the license, and any potential buyer couldn't be certain that you transferred it to them. For an audio-book on physical media, when you buy it, you buy the license implicitly attached to the copy. But since copyright is a mess, a recording of audio is a different copyright from the material used to generate the audio. An audio-book of Jeremy Irons reading a story has a different copyright as an audio-book of Bobcat Goldthwait reading the same story. You're not licensing the story itself, but a specific recording of the story. It's the same reason why a piece of music can be in the public domain, while a recording of it made by the FooBar Ensemble in 1991 can still be copyrighted. That theory of copyright is also how museums and collections try to claim copyright on digitizations of visual art that has long been public domain. There are a lot of tests about "sufficiently transformative" and "slavish copy" and whatnot. There's also a lot of money in ensuring that cross-media copyrights remain separated. From the publisher perspective, someone has a license for an audio recording. They probably also sell licenses for print copies, and licenses for e-books. And these are all sold individually, not as a bundle, because they are allowed by law to treat all these as separate works. From the consumer perspective, buying the audio recording is implicitly licensing both the specific recording and the work on which it was based, because otherwise, how could one possibly legally enjoy the content of that recording? So the consumer considers it perfectly acceptable to transform the format of what they believe they have licensed. I paid; this copy is mine now; I can do with it as I please. Parent post reinforces this. "I'm paying for the author's story + actor." But you're not. You licensed a copy of a recording, period. It's a derivative work, and you're piggybacking on the recording-owner's licensing of the original story, that gives them the right to make an audio-book. This confusion is not the consumer's fault. It arises from the non-intuitive cross-media parts of copyright law. It arises from the publishers and distributors of copyrighted works exploiting the ambiguity between buying a license and buying a copy. They would dearly like to have their cake, and eat it too. When people buy cakes, and then eat them (as one does with cakes) they get upset, because they sincerely believe that selling a cake and selling the right to eat a cake are completely different things. If they choose the non-transferable individual licensing model, they can no longer sell the same work to the same person multiple times. If I lose my file, I still have the license, and I can either demand a fresh download from the distributor or acquire one from another source without being considered a pirate. If they choose the license-attached-to-copy model, they can no longer capture the resale market. I can read or listen to my book and then resell it to someone else. What they want, but should not have, is a revocable non-transferable license attached to a single copy, so that if I buy a copy, and lose it, I still have to buy another copy, but if I then locate my original copy again, I can't resell it or get a refund for it. That model is worth more money to them, in their estimation. In my opinion, the publisher argument is bullshit. But it is founded in law. The law happens to be an ass. So they will likely win, until a federal appellate judge decides that they want their public service career to be destroyed by Disney et al.

balls187 7y ago

> How are they doing anything but trying to charge me twice for the same story? That's essentially what is happening, but that's not the onus for the copyright law. Standard IANAL caveat. The law is set to protect and encourage content creators by clearly defining what is copyrighted work, and how that copyrighted work can be used. > why once I have the audiobook I could not be allowed the text version for free. Speculation, but it could be that publishers haven't figured out the simple economics of rolling the cost into the price of an audio book, or that publishing deals with authors prevent that type of bundling.

electrograv 7y ago
Related scenario: Imagine I sold a digital image (artwork). Imagine I sell two versions, each licensed separately (if you want both, you have to buy both): One is a full color image, and the other is a grayscale image. If you display the color image on a black-and-white monitor, you will be seeing something virtually identical to the grayscale version. By the logic I'm seeing here against Amazon, it would therefore be considered copyright infringement to sell black-and-white monitors?
- rsstack 7y ago
  I love this example. I can understand why the audio version isn't included for free with the text version: the voice artist had to work 40~50 hours to create it, akin to the coloring artist in your example. But the reverse doesn't make sense. When I buy an audio book, I'm already paying both for the contents and for the execution: surely the contents were already paid for.
- balls187 7y ago
  > black-and-white monitors Don't know. But is it similar to DeCSS technology and the MPAA. B&W Monitors could be argued to have multiple purposes, a side-effect is showing copyrighted images. I'm not fully informed as to what Amazon is doing, but if their technology is being applied specifically to create digital text versions of Audio Books, then it could be argued in a similar vein as DeCSS, which was argued to be necessary to provide "backups" of physical media. It could also be argued that Amazon is used legal maneuvering for a future showdown in which they can argue the effort to create digital text books is minuscule and thus drive the market price down Again, IANAL.

ergothus 7y ago

Other responses have tried to summarize WHAT is happening, but not as much as the why (or at least, the direct why as opposed to the handwavey "encourage innovation" why). For that, look to the past before copyright was a thing. Sure, there was the immediate result of when you put out a book others would copy the text (sometimes poorly). But another huge issues was _translations_. If you put out your book in, say, English, that meant you had a fairly small market. Those with the money for books and the background knowledge and interest in your topic were probably among the smaller well-off classes in several countries. Translations of a hot title were big money - and they'd be done, probably by others, and probably not as you (the author) would like. Thus, while the first copyrights were "don't copy the text", derivative works like translations were soon added. And because other languages mean other countries, there was an incentive to create international agreements, and this led to modern copyright. Arguably, all of the above are pretty decent reasons for the copyright protections we have. Consumers benefit because creators can expect to be paid for their work, and because creators are more likely to focus on quality than just getting it out first (particularly on translations). In that light, the argument that a speech-to-text translation requires permission makes some sense, at least legally. One could even argue that the copyright-holders (publishers, in this case) have a reason to not want a poor speech-to-text translation to ruin the reception of their works. Of course, this falls down when the publishers are preventing purchasers from making use of such services even when those purchasers are aware of the source of the translation, and any motive other than greed falls away when the publisher wants to be paid a second time. But the publishers aren't coming at this from nowhere, it's an existing, long-present concept. Arguably laws should change. Alternatively, consumers could demand changes in behavior (I have low expectations of that, but that's the theory).

excursionist 7y ago

The whole idea of copyright is unsound, so arguing about it's 'intricacies' is pretty pointless. Garbage in, garbage out.

whiddershins 7y ago

In true ELIF: Copyright = right to make a copy

vorotato 7y ago

Hard to move too far forwards without acknowledging that copyright law's constructions are deeply divorced from the public's values.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

I'd have to check but I'm not so sure you're buying, in the traditional sense, either of them. In modern legal terms, you are paying a fee for the rights to access that work in that format. It used to be you'd purchase a print book, you'd own it, and you could do whatever you wanted with it (e.g., resell it, burn it). That's not the case anymore. You can't resell it, not because of the format, but because you don't own it in the first place. I'm not a legal expert, and I know it might sound like I'm parsing words, but I feel there's some validity to my 50k feet assessment.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Unfortunately, even five year olds realize that the reasoning they use doesn't make sense. I gave a short talk on the economics of information and started with a very similar example which was this; Given that 3 ounces of ink and 200 pages of nice 20lb paper, bound with sewing and combines with a cardboard cover into a book costs roughly $3 in reasonable quantities, costs $20 when the ink is used to print J.K. Rowlings story of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Clearly the same package with my scribbling about wizards and magic would likely not even be valued at enough to cover the $3 printing cost :-). So it is clear that the information has an intrinsic value, but what is less clear is how it develops that value and how much of the value can be captured. The book publishers have gone down this road before[1]. 10 years ago the first 'text to speech' features came out in Kindle and Amazon backed down. Ten years later the Kindle is in a stronger place, so Amazon is perhaps inclined to not back down this time. What I find particularly amusing, is that publishers, when asked back in '09 if it was "Okay" for parents to read their books aloud to their children, they agreed but felt reading aloud to a group of children (as a teacher might do), or to a group of people unrelated to you, was a violation of their commercial rights which unfortunately they couldn't do anything about. Not so with the Kindle, which is standing in here as the reader, that gives them someone to sue. As technology gives people the ability to put information 'goods' in a real goods market framework (hard to reproduce, Etc.) the owner of those goods exploit those capabilities and litigate anything that would damage their capability to do so. Personally, I think it is a matter of time before the economics of information become more mainstream in their understanding much like the changes that allow people to reason about "service work" in discussions of GDP. But it is going to take a while. I look forward to reading papers that talk about economies working with goods, services, and information as their drivers of economic activity. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090227/1759173928.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090227/1759173928.shtml

ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago

You're not entitled to a sheet music when going to a concert either.

jayd16 7y ago
Ok but explain why in a way that doesn't end up with "because publishers want more money"

ineedasername 7y ago

Forget about the philosophical "because you didn't buy that" or the various decent counter arguments. What it comes down to is that publishers purchase very narrow licenses of an author's output. One may specifically buy print rights, and only print rights for a specific geographical region like English USA. Or just the audio rights for a region. The same publisher often does not own both print and audio. So the big publishers that deal mostly in print get very defensive when sales of a copy they had no part in might eat some of the sales they might otherwise get. That's what you see in this case.