10 ms·

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

by 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"?
  - vasco 7y ago
    All the people who would get paid, since the only people doing extra work to create the AI written-version of the audio are Audible software engineers, and they aren't getting paid any extra when you enable the feature.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      People selling something in general are not getting paid for their "contribution", they are getting paid because (a) they have something you want, (b) they ask for money to give it. They are getting paid for the ownership. If I sell a plot of land I inherited from N generations ago, there was zero of my "contribution" factored in into the price (and perhaps zero of my ancestors who first got it contribution. Such plots might have just been up for grabs at the time). The price can still be millions for said plot of land -- it's all to demand, nothing to do with some compensation for "contribution". In this case, the publishers (and owners of the story copyright) want to sell the 2 different versions separately. It's as simple as that. And you can complain about "useless middlemen, etc" but it could just as well have been the author that wanted to sell his stories as different deals for different mediums, and not e.g. allow automatic conversion from one format to another. Usually, he who sells something sets the price for what you get (and determines what you get). You might agree and buy it or not, but you don't get to force them otherwise, because you "really wanted X", or "you thought you got Y too", etc.
      - harshreality 7y ago
        You're taking an example from the world of rivalrous goods and trying to apply it to the world of non-rivalrous goods (where supply is no longer a factor). You then try to reframe copyright, from "Copyright is forcing consumers to overpay for some things" into (paraphrasing) "Anyone complaining about the current state of copyright law[1] is trying to force artists and publishers to live in poverty." [1] Which is mostly the result of a century's worth of lobbying by IP holders with little to no effective counter-lobbying by consumers.
        7y ago
- SiVal 7y ago
  Your question is a reasonable one, but you're misunderstanding the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that you are offered something specific for a specified price. You can accept the deal, reject it, or make a counter offer. What you can't do is declare that your payment means that you actually bought the rights to the text of the book or anything else you unilaterally and post facto include in the purchase for philosophical reasons, when those things weren't included in the offer that you accepted. What was offered, and you accepted, was a license to unlimited personal listening to an audio performance. If you want something else, make an offer or wait for them to make one. It's not quite as simple as this because governments often want to get into the deal and declare that certain offers aren't what the offerer offers but what the lawmakers think he should have offered, but absent this intercession, you were offered an audio performance for a certain price, and if you accepted, that's what you got.
  - krisoft 7y ago
    Great. I accepted the audio performance and that's what i got. Can i run the audio performance through a speech to text engine?
    - ysavir 7y ago
      Not a lawyer, but I imagine that you, as an end user, can do that, so long as you are not selling that text or distributing that text. But Amazon, who is licensed to provide you with an audio book but not a text book, cannot offer you a speech-to-text rendition of that audio book as part of your audiobook purchase. Nor do I imagine them being able to offer you the technology to do it on your own as a "feature", as that would be a rather hideous loophole.
      - wbhart 7y ago
        I imagine that Amazon are going to argue in court that if the publishers are held to be correct, then computer monitor manufacturers are not licensed to display copies of the work and that they also should pay the publisher (again) as should people who make software that alters the performance, e.g. volume or equalizer functions. Amazon is not fundamentally offering a textual copy of the work. If they were doing so they would be violating the license. Instead they are offering a technology to transform the (possibly flawed performance of) the work using a tool (that is itself possibly flawed). That is not the same thing as distributing a textual copy of the original work. A computer is a device on which the work is licensed to be distributed, and it happens to have the capability to transform the work, just as a volume knob or a graphic equalizer would. If Amazon can't offer this technology because they are licensed to distribute the work, what is to stop someone selling such technology who is not licensed to distribute the work? The effect is the same, precisely because it is a general purpose computing device with sophisticated functionality. And yet I don't see publishers getting far with a claim that all manufacturers of speech-to-text devices (think of deaf people) should pay them because the device could be used to transform their works. Of course I know this is not how any publisher sees their work. E.g. you need a different license to perform a work than you need to modify or make a video production of a work (mechanical vs sync license, etc.)
- coldtea 7y ago
  >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 The whole publisher intention behind copyright and license rights is that you shouldn't think of digital products any differently than you think of physical products on a shelf. In other words, the idea is that just because a digital product costs $0 to copy it doesn't mean it doesn't harm them business wise to make one and not pay them. A physical book/cd doesn't cost as much as its sold either -- it usually costs way way less. So "cost of physical copy" shouldn't be thought as the differentiator...
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    The whole publisher intention behind copyright and license rights is that you shouldn't think of digital products any differently than you think of physical products on a shelf. They don't claim that at all. Digital items are typically licensed, not owned outright (as is the case with a physical book). That said, the way the market is currently configured, audio books are a separate product from digital text. That's fine and legal. But, we don't have to like it. I have a legally blind* family member and it always feels a bit like a scam when she has to repurchase books that somebody else in the family already purchased. * She can see, barely. For complex texts (particularly textbooks), she prefers to have an audio copy as well as the printed/digital text.
    - saltminer 7y ago
      >Digital items are typically licensed, not owned outright (as is the case with a physical book). You own an MP3 in the same way you own a book. If you email an MP3 to others in exchange for payment, the FBI aren't going to bust down your friends' doors and securely erase the files from their drives, it's up to the licensor to sue you for damages. Likewise, if you copy books and start selling them at the flea market, nobody's going to round up and destroy the unlicensed copies, it's up to the publisher to destroy you in court.
- zwily 7y ago
  You can usually get a discount on the audible version when you own the ebook, but not the reverse. It’s strange.
- slg 7y ago
  >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... Let's say you are an iPhone user and you have bought a bunch of media from Apple. Maybe you really hate the next iPhone announcement and want to move to Android. Would you expect Google to give you a free copy of all the media you originally bought from Apple? Also you have to get away from the idea that the price of the content is dictated by the costs to produce that content. That production costs is only the minimum price that would allow production to continue. Prices for digital goods are often just dictated by what the seller thinks demand is (since supply is practically infinite assuming there are no contractual restrictions).
- DanBC 7y ago
  > author, editor, publisher, actor, distributor ...and someone to buy the microphones and recording equipment, and someone to push the buttons, and someone to edit the audio.
  - chrisan 7y ago
    Which I paid for by buying the audiobook. I'm asking the reverse, who is getting left out of collecting money when I purchase the audiobook and then want a digital copy for whispersync?
    - DanBC 7y ago
      Do you think the audio-book publisher is the same organisation as the printed-book publisher?
- matwood 7y ago
  > How am I not paying for the same thing twice? In some ways you are. This is the same pain the music industry went through when they went digital. People had purchased records, 8-tracks, tapes, and finally CDs often of the same music and often multiple times because those physical items wore out. Now I can buy a song once and it is effectively mine forever. Book publishers see what happened to the music industry and are fighting every way they can. A lot of times those fights do not make sense, but the industry has decided to fight everything.
- dkurth 7y ago
  > A digital book requires the same minus actor The digital book also requires formatting work. Depending on the type of book and the publisher's workflow, this can be simple (an export from InDesign) or very complex (a custom process for converting a non-technical author's Word documents for a cookbook with an inconsistent layout into an EPUB that renders nicely across devices).
- the_reformation 7y ago
  This doesn't make any sense. It's not zero-cost for a company that provides a book to also provide an audiobook. Both require their own supply and value chains. An audiobook will require recording studios, artists, a streaming audio product, an app, massive storage requirements, separate catalogues and search. The only aspect it shares with the book supply chain (which is also costly for the company) is the IP. It might make sense for Amazon to bundle the kindle/audible versions from a sales POV, but you have no moral right to owning a story in all formats- there are real costs and people involved.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  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) Two different things. One is an audio performance, which you bought. It contains elements not in the print/ebook version. The other is a print version of the same work. The purchase includes the formatting, editing, etc., that went into producing the print version which are not found in the audiobook version. Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium? Why is it that programmers get paid six figures to create just another database application? Aren't they all the same thing? No!? Well, it turns out that creating an audiobook and creating an ebook are two very separate things that each take a fair amount of work and that each deserve to be paid for.
- johnrgrace 7y ago
  For the book you mention, The Way of kings. There are two audiobook publishers; McMillan Audio for the single voice work and Graphic Audio (a different company) for the multi voice.
SkyBelow 7y ago
>For the same reason you're not entitled to a free (or even discount) paperback if you buy the hardback But I am. It would take some work, but I can undo the binding of the hardback and turn it into a softback. I can also scan the pages and print them into a new softback. I can even just retype the story and print it into a new softback. Now, selling, trading, or lending those copies will be an issue, but I don't think anyone here is arguing that someone should be able to use speech to text and then sell the text generated, so the comparison stills stands. And I can't expect to be given an official softback book, just like I don't have to expect to be given an official text version. But being able to turn an audio book into text seems well within my rights.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  > But being able to turn an audio book into text seems well within my rights. Maybe it is. The law isn't the best place to glean any useful moral principles from. I think if you're willing to put in the effort, nobody's going to stop you from making your own text version from the audiobook. But once you're in a position where you're distributing that unauthorized version, or you're already a distributor of the audiobook version and add a feature that automatically creates a text version (without appropriate licensing from the copyright holder), it's something else entirely.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    >The law isn't the best place to glean any useful moral principles from. I should clarify I was talking about the existing legal rights owning property entitles me to. Moral rights as well, but that discussion isn't nearly as relevant or useful in this particular case. Sorry for not clarifying. >and add a feature that automatically creates a text version This is where I'm not so certain about. If they add a keyboard and notepad that lets me take audio myself, then where is the significant difference in adding software that makes it easier for me to do the transcription? Is there a certain level of ease that anything easier than that becomes illegal?
    - jplayer01 7y ago
m-p-3 7y ago
They're well within their rights in doing that, but the movie industry at least kinda understood that if you want to attract customers and minimize piracy, your best option is to minimize friction and let them watch it on the platform they want. I bought many blu-rays that came with the DVD version and an UltraViolet code. It made the choice of buying the blu-ray copy a much simpler choice at a time I didn't have a blu-ray player yet, and it still meant I could watch the DVD version noe, and watch the improved HD copy later. At least some book publishers offers you the ebook versiin when you purchase a hardcopy, but it's still not universal. If they want to minimize piracy, their best option is to make their content available in many ways as possible. I'm not saying the movie industry got it nailed (they still have a long way to go), but they definitely are better than the book industry now.
de_watcher 7y ago
Analogy doesn't work, clinging to old ways doesn't help. Paper is a way to make information into something you can sell as potatoes. But information is different, it's more like that 'single fish he feed dozen people with'. For decades already we're thinking about what to do with that low price to copy.
samstave 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 And people wonder why pirates exist...
vernie 7y ago
Wouldn't it be more accurate say that you're licensing access to a specific rendition of the content?
harshreality 7y ago
The physical book example is not a reasonable comparison because you could probably buy a readable, non-waterlogged copy (or alternative physical format) on amazon for less than the retail price. That option is not available for ebooks or audio books, since they're licensed not owned. And licenses for ebooks are unilaterally dictated because of the copyright monopoly. You want a normal copy of the ebook? Pay $10. Typeset in Arial? Another $10. Typeset in Comic Sans? Another $10. Voiced by a free TTS engine? $20 because our market research indicates people pay more for audio books. The logical way to approach this is that if a product can be automatically converted from one format to another, getting both formats should cost the same as getting the source format, or at most the set should include a marginal fee for the use of the conversion technology development costs + marginal compute costs). But of course publishers aren't going to do that. That reality, however, is not a defense of the status quo; rather, it's an argument for copyright reform. Copyright monopoly forces people to pay again and again for "multiple bites at the apple" for purely-digital products that have no secondary market. They're even more arbitrarily priced than normal IP goods like paper books and CDs and DVDs which at least had secondary markets.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

by dagw 7y ago

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"?
- vasco 7y ago
  All the people who would get paid, since the only people doing extra work to create the AI written-version of the audio are Audible software engineers, and they aren't getting paid any extra when you enable the feature.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    People selling something in general are not getting paid for their "contribution", they are getting paid because (a) they have something you want, (b) they ask for money to give it. They are getting paid for the ownership. If I sell a plot of land I inherited from N generations ago, there was zero of my "contribution" factored in into the price (and perhaps zero of my ancestors who first got it contribution. Such plots might have just been up for grabs at the time). The price can still be millions for said plot of land -- it's all to demand, nothing to do with some compensation for "contribution". In this case, the publishers (and owners of the story copyright) want to sell the 2 different versions separately. It's as simple as that. And you can complain about "useless middlemen, etc" but it could just as well have been the author that wanted to sell his stories as different deals for different mediums, and not e.g. allow automatic conversion from one format to another. Usually, he who sells something sets the price for what you get (and determines what you get). You might agree and buy it or not, but you don't get to force them otherwise, because you "really wanted X", or "you thought you got Y too", etc.
    - harshreality 7y ago
      You're taking an example from the world of rivalrous goods and trying to apply it to the world of non-rivalrous goods (where supply is no longer a factor). You then try to reframe copyright, from "Copyright is forcing consumers to overpay for some things" into (paraphrasing) "Anyone complaining about the current state of copyright law[1] is trying to force artists and publishers to live in poverty." [1] Which is mostly the result of a century's worth of lobbying by IP holders with little to no effective counter-lobbying by consumers.
      - 7y ago
SiVal 7y ago
Your question is a reasonable one, but you're misunderstanding the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that you are offered something specific for a specified price. You can accept the deal, reject it, or make a counter offer. What you can't do is declare that your payment means that you actually bought the rights to the text of the book or anything else you unilaterally and post facto include in the purchase for philosophical reasons, when those things weren't included in the offer that you accepted. What was offered, and you accepted, was a license to unlimited personal listening to an audio performance. If you want something else, make an offer or wait for them to make one. It's not quite as simple as this because governments often want to get into the deal and declare that certain offers aren't what the offerer offers but what the lawmakers think he should have offered, but absent this intercession, you were offered an audio performance for a certain price, and if you accepted, that's what you got.
- krisoft 7y ago
  Great. I accepted the audio performance and that's what i got. Can i run the audio performance through a speech to text engine?
  - ysavir 7y ago
    Not a lawyer, but I imagine that you, as an end user, can do that, so long as you are not selling that text or distributing that text. But Amazon, who is licensed to provide you with an audio book but not a text book, cannot offer you a speech-to-text rendition of that audio book as part of your audiobook purchase. Nor do I imagine them being able to offer you the technology to do it on your own as a "feature", as that would be a rather hideous loophole.
    - wbhart 7y ago
      I imagine that Amazon are going to argue in court that if the publishers are held to be correct, then computer monitor manufacturers are not licensed to display copies of the work and that they also should pay the publisher (again) as should people who make software that alters the performance, e.g. volume or equalizer functions. Amazon is not fundamentally offering a textual copy of the work. If they were doing so they would be violating the license. Instead they are offering a technology to transform the (possibly flawed performance of) the work using a tool (that is itself possibly flawed). That is not the same thing as distributing a textual copy of the original work. A computer is a device on which the work is licensed to be distributed, and it happens to have the capability to transform the work, just as a volume knob or a graphic equalizer would. If Amazon can't offer this technology because they are licensed to distribute the work, what is to stop someone selling such technology who is not licensed to distribute the work? The effect is the same, precisely because it is a general purpose computing device with sophisticated functionality. And yet I don't see publishers getting far with a claim that all manufacturers of speech-to-text devices (think of deaf people) should pay them because the device could be used to transform their works. Of course I know this is not how any publisher sees their work. E.g. you need a different license to perform a work than you need to modify or make a video production of a work (mechanical vs sync license, etc.)
coldtea 7y ago
>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 The whole publisher intention behind copyright and license rights is that you shouldn't think of digital products any differently than you think of physical products on a shelf. In other words, the idea is that just because a digital product costs $0 to copy it doesn't mean it doesn't harm them business wise to make one and not pay them. A physical book/cd doesn't cost as much as its sold either -- it usually costs way way less. So "cost of physical copy" shouldn't be thought as the differentiator...
- alistairSH 7y ago
  The whole publisher intention behind copyright and license rights is that you shouldn't think of digital products any differently than you think of physical products on a shelf. They don't claim that at all. Digital items are typically licensed, not owned outright (as is the case with a physical book). That said, the way the market is currently configured, audio books are a separate product from digital text. That's fine and legal. But, we don't have to like it. I have a legally blind* family member and it always feels a bit like a scam when she has to repurchase books that somebody else in the family already purchased. * She can see, barely. For complex texts (particularly textbooks), she prefers to have an audio copy as well as the printed/digital text.
  - saltminer 7y ago
    >Digital items are typically licensed, not owned outright (as is the case with a physical book). You own an MP3 in the same way you own a book. If you email an MP3 to others in exchange for payment, the FBI aren't going to bust down your friends' doors and securely erase the files from their drives, it's up to the licensor to sue you for damages. Likewise, if you copy books and start selling them at the flea market, nobody's going to round up and destroy the unlicensed copies, it's up to the publisher to destroy you in court.
zwily 7y ago
You can usually get a discount on the audible version when you own the ebook, but not the reverse. It’s strange.
slg 7y ago
>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... Let's say you are an iPhone user and you have bought a bunch of media from Apple. Maybe you really hate the next iPhone announcement and want to move to Android. Would you expect Google to give you a free copy of all the media you originally bought from Apple? Also you have to get away from the idea that the price of the content is dictated by the costs to produce that content. That production costs is only the minimum price that would allow production to continue. Prices for digital goods are often just dictated by what the seller thinks demand is (since supply is practically infinite assuming there are no contractual restrictions).
DanBC 7y ago
> author, editor, publisher, actor, distributor ...and someone to buy the microphones and recording equipment, and someone to push the buttons, and someone to edit the audio.
- chrisan 7y ago
  Which I paid for by buying the audiobook. I'm asking the reverse, who is getting left out of collecting money when I purchase the audiobook and then want a digital copy for whispersync?
  - DanBC 7y ago
    Do you think the audio-book publisher is the same organisation as the printed-book publisher?
matwood 7y ago
> How am I not paying for the same thing twice? In some ways you are. This is the same pain the music industry went through when they went digital. People had purchased records, 8-tracks, tapes, and finally CDs often of the same music and often multiple times because those physical items wore out. Now I can buy a song once and it is effectively mine forever. Book publishers see what happened to the music industry and are fighting every way they can. A lot of times those fights do not make sense, but the industry has decided to fight everything.
dkurth 7y ago
> A digital book requires the same minus actor The digital book also requires formatting work. Depending on the type of book and the publisher's workflow, this can be simple (an export from InDesign) or very complex (a custom process for converting a non-technical author's Word documents for a cookbook with an inconsistent layout into an EPUB that renders nicely across devices).
the_reformation 7y ago
This doesn't make any sense. It's not zero-cost for a company that provides a book to also provide an audiobook. Both require their own supply and value chains. An audiobook will require recording studios, artists, a streaming audio product, an app, massive storage requirements, separate catalogues and search. The only aspect it shares with the book supply chain (which is also costly for the company) is the IP. It might make sense for Amazon to bundle the kindle/audible versions from a sales POV, but you have no moral right to owning a story in all formats- there are real costs and people involved.
gamblor956 7y ago
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) Two different things. One is an audio performance, which you bought. It contains elements not in the print/ebook version. The other is a print version of the same work. The purchase includes the formatting, editing, etc., that went into producing the print version which are not found in the audiobook version. Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium? Why is it that programmers get paid six figures to create just another database application? Aren't they all the same thing? No!? Well, it turns out that creating an audiobook and creating an ebook are two very separate things that each take a fair amount of work and that each deserve to be paid for.
johnrgrace 7y ago
For the book you mention, The Way of kings. There are two audiobook publishers; McMillan Audio for the single voice work and Graphic Audio (a different company) for the multi voice.

SkyBelow 7y ago

>For the same reason you're not entitled to a free (or even discount) paperback if you buy the hardback But I am. It would take some work, but I can undo the binding of the hardback and turn it into a softback. I can also scan the pages and print them into a new softback. I can even just retype the story and print it into a new softback. Now, selling, trading, or lending those copies will be an issue, but I don't think anyone here is arguing that someone should be able to use speech to text and then sell the text generated, so the comparison stills stands. And I can't expect to be given an official softback book, just like I don't have to expect to be given an official text version. But being able to turn an audio book into text seems well within my rights.

jplayer01 7y ago
> But being able to turn an audio book into text seems well within my rights. Maybe it is. The law isn't the best place to glean any useful moral principles from. I think if you're willing to put in the effort, nobody's going to stop you from making your own text version from the audiobook. But once you're in a position where you're distributing that unauthorized version, or you're already a distributor of the audiobook version and add a feature that automatically creates a text version (without appropriate licensing from the copyright holder), it's something else entirely.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  >The law isn't the best place to glean any useful moral principles from. I should clarify I was talking about the existing legal rights owning property entitles me to. Moral rights as well, but that discussion isn't nearly as relevant or useful in this particular case. Sorry for not clarifying. >and add a feature that automatically creates a text version This is where I'm not so certain about. If they add a keyboard and notepad that lets me take audio myself, then where is the significant difference in adding software that makes it easier for me to do the transcription? Is there a certain level of ease that anything easier than that becomes illegal?
  - jplayer01 7y ago

m-p-3 7y ago

They're well within their rights in doing that, but the movie industry at least kinda understood that if you want to attract customers and minimize piracy, your best option is to minimize friction and let them watch it on the platform they want. I bought many blu-rays that came with the DVD version and an UltraViolet code. It made the choice of buying the blu-ray copy a much simpler choice at a time I didn't have a blu-ray player yet, and it still meant I could watch the DVD version noe, and watch the improved HD copy later. At least some book publishers offers you the ebook versiin when you purchase a hardcopy, but it's still not universal. If they want to minimize piracy, their best option is to make their content available in many ways as possible. I'm not saying the movie industry got it nailed (they still have a long way to go), but they definitely are better than the book industry now.

de_watcher 7y ago

Analogy doesn't work, clinging to old ways doesn't help. Paper is a way to make information into something you can sell as potatoes. But information is different, it's more like that 'single fish he feed dozen people with'. For decades already we're thinking about what to do with that low price to copy.

samstave 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 And people wonder why pirates exist...

vernie 7y ago

Wouldn't it be more accurate say that you're licensing access to a specific rendition of the content?

harshreality 7y ago

The physical book example is not a reasonable comparison because you could probably buy a readable, non-waterlogged copy (or alternative physical format) on amazon for less than the retail price. That option is not available for ebooks or audio books, since they're licensed not owned. And licenses for ebooks are unilaterally dictated because of the copyright monopoly. You want a normal copy of the ebook? Pay $10. Typeset in Arial? Another $10. Typeset in Comic Sans? Another $10. Voiced by a free TTS engine? $20 because our market research indicates people pay more for audio books. The logical way to approach this is that if a product can be automatically converted from one format to another, getting both formats should cost the same as getting the source format, or at most the set should include a marginal fee for the use of the conversion technology development costs + marginal compute costs). But of course publishers aren't going to do that. That reality, however, is not a defense of the status quo; rather, it's an argument for copyright reform. Copyright monopoly forces people to pay again and again for "multiple bites at the apple" for purely-digital products that have no secondary market. They're even more arbitrarily priced than normal IP goods like paper books and CDs and DVDs which at least had secondary markets.

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