5 ms·

> 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 b

• 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.
        • coldtea 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). Read demand as "people wanting the stuff" as opposed to "people wanting the stuff versus available stuff". I'm not talking about the law of supply and demand, but of, let's say, "willingness to pay to get the thing if no other way is available" (even if it's just for legal reasons that no other way is available). >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." Nope. In fact I wouldn't care if some artists and publishers lived in poverty. What I argue (and this is not about personal preference) is that the transaction is: (a) publisher has something another person wants, sets price (b) said person can buy it or not We can imagine a setup that's just based on somebody owning the sole ability to sell a thing and its digital copies, and demanding whatever for it. Scarcity, marginal cost of copy, etc, don't need to come into play. People who is only authorized to sell gets to set whatever terms, even if those terms are "I want people to pay twice if they want the text version and the audio version" or even crazier. That's the reality (and, more or less, the law). We could make it like "Everybody is authorized to make as many digital copies as they want, for free, redistribute them, even put their names on the work" if we wanted. It's not something set in stone, it's only set in the interests of publishers and in law. And while we can argue that the interests of creators are not the same, most creators tend to just sell their rights to/go along with the publishers, so the point is moot from a legal perspective. >Which is mostly the result of a century's worth of lobbying by IP holders with little to no effective counter-lobbying by consumers. Well, in life people don't get what the want/need/deserve. They get what they've managed to negotiate. If consumers don't counter-lobby/protest/break some heads they'll get the laws ip-holders want.
    • dagw 7y ago
      Try starting from the author. The author invested his own time and wrote a thing, but for whatever reason didn't want to go out and sell it himself. So he sold a company the rights to print and sell text copies of the thing he'd written. He then sold the rights to sell audio books of his work to a different company (and perhaps the right to make TV show of his book to a third company). The only reason a company was willing to pay for the rights to the text copy of the work was because they where being guaranteed some sort of monopoly. If that monopoly is weakened then they have less incentives to pay the author. If that is a good or bad outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.
      • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Do you think that's how it works in practice, any evidence? I suspect the authors now are getting the same, or less, and the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower) and taking a higher proportion.
        • ghaff 7y ago
          >the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower) The costs associated with printing and distributing a physical book are a much smaller slice of the pie than a lot of people assume. (Back when I looked into this, it was about $2.50 per copy for a hardback as I recall. The author cost for a PoD trade paperback from Amazon is about $5.) Also, in general, the end-user price for books is generally significantly lower than it used to be. Go back a couple decades and you mostly paid list price for books and paperbacks usually weren't available for a year or so after a book came out in hardcover.
  • bitexploder 7y ago
    Audio books are performance and story. It’s not just the words. It is a substantially different work of art, even if it is the same story. I think that is where the GP is too reductionist.
    • danso 7y ago
      I agree that audiobooks require substantial work. But I'm confused about who is "getting paid twice for contributing nothing"? Is it the writer that's getting paid twice "for contributing nothing" to an audio book? That doesn't make sense to me.
    • derefr 7y ago
      Audiobooks add on top of the original book; but I would argue that you could train a human being with a set of deterministic rules that they can use to transform an audio-book into the exact text of the text-book that was published, with 100% fidelity, 100% of the time. Which is to say, an audiobook is a lossless embedding of the original text-book. If you’re buying the audiobook, you’re already buying the text-book; it’s in there! Another way to look at it: if you own a music video, do you have a license for the song that the music video is a music video of? I would argue you do—you have to have that license, to be able to have a license for the MV, just like you have to own licenses to all the tracks on an album, to be able to claim to have a license for listening to the album. And, as such, it really wouldn’t make sense to attempt to sell licenses to consumption of MVs, that don’t implicitly include licenses to consumption of the audio tracks within said MVs. (Has anyone ever argued that people don’t have a right to use youtube-dl to extract the audio track from MVs publicly-posted by their rights-owners? I assume, if they did, this argument went about as well as arguing you can’t record music off the radio...) This is the equivalence being offered here: a text book is to an audiobook as the audio track of a music video is to the MV itself: a component. In the case of a text book, it’s not one that’s literally there in bits; but since it can be extracted with 100% fidelity, the information that component is made up of is clearly there, in the thing you bought. It’s no different than if an audio track was embedded in your video but was reversed or something.
      • JumpCrisscross 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.