4 ms·
I'm sympathetic to the plight of the starving (or even well-fed) writer wanting to get paid for their work. But the opinion espoused in this piece is the classi
by witten 18y ago
I'm sympathetic to the plight of the starving (or even well-fed) writer wanting to get paid for their work. But the opinion espoused in this piece is the classic argument that just because an industry has grown accustomed to a particular revenue stream or business model, they should therefore always and forever have the privilege of keeping it. And anyone who introduces products or technology to prevent that or cut into their revenue is not playing fair, morally questionable, and/or should have to compensate them for lost revenue.
It's a ridiculous argument.
- Tichy 18y agoAlso, isn't reading on a kindle also like a movie? At least when you scroll, the text is moving across the screen. So I think Amazon should also pay for the movie rights.
- Retric 18y agoI don't think the refresh rate is fast enough to "scroll".
- Tichy 18y agoWell, how many frames per second until something is considered to be a movie? ;-)
- throw_away 18y agothe refresh rate is way faster in this version. but it doesn't scroll, it just goes to the next page when the voice gets to that point.
- sethg 18y agoThis is not his argument. Separate revenue streams for audio books is not just a quaint custom in the publishing world, but a consequence of copyright law, which treats text and audio rights as properties that may be licensed separately. He's arguing that his constituents' property is being taken from them without their consent. I think his case is weak, but it's not dumb.
- brlewis 18y agoMore precisely it treats text and audio as distinct works which must be licensed individually. I wrote a lot about this at http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2009-02-11 http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2009-02-11
- wavesplash 18y agoThere isn't an 'audio right' in copyright law. The author is trying to justify the loss of an established contractual norm for a sold derivative work (a professionally produced reading) by expanding the notion of copyright. The author is confusing contract rights with copyright. http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html
- jpd 18y agoBut Amazon is neither selling nor giving away audio books. They are giving away a general text-to-speech solution which may conveniently be used on a book. Arguing that this is violating copyrights is the same thing as saying that text-to-speech is inherently illegal.
- andreyf 18y agoI wonder how things would change if the text-to-speech were done server-side? I'd imagine one can get significantly better quality if you're not doing text-to-speech on the 400Mhz processor on the Kindle 2.
- blinks 18y agoThe issue there is the bandwidth required for streaming audio. This is a device set up for batch downloads and not much else -- when you add time-sensitive network requirements like this, you make customers unhappy. Also, what if you're using it as a "book on tape" in the car, on a road trip through the middle of nowhere? You lose network connection, you lose your book on tape. tldr: I think it would be better quality, when you could get it, but at some level reliability is more important for this application.
- 18y ago