This week we're learning about a lawsuit from a few years ago involving the Author's Guild and Kindle's "read aloud" feature. You can read about it from the A.G.'s president's point of view here and then the other point of view here.
I'm inclined to agree with the latter article. I think a text-speech feature has nothing to do with an audio-book. It's simply your device reading aloud a book that you've purchased. I think it would be really difficult to charge extra for only people who were planning at some point to use that feature. What if I had a Kindle 2, but I hated the text speech? Would they have made me pay extra for a feature I had no intention of using just because that might have taken a few extra dollars away from the publisher? I hope that sounds as silly to you as it does to me.
I searched for an article about how that all worked out, but I had trouble finding anything recent. It seems like from that last link I put in the beginning, they reached an agreement, but also that they were setting their sights on Apple for exactly the same reason.
I feel like people are way too quick to point a finger at someone else about copyright. Maybe they just haven't done enough research to see when something is really in violation or not, or they just want to see if maybe the judge will grant them a whole lot of money. That's probably more likely...
Hi Cynthia. I agree wholeheartedly with you. As I posted to another blog, I don't buy in to the audio books, nor do I own a Kindle. I prefer the "voices in my own head" that come out to help me visualize and "hear" the story in the paperback book I am reading. People seem to be getting more and more about the frivolous lawsuit. It always brings me back to how ridiculous I thought the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit was. I think the woman that won that ought to be ashamed of herself!
ReplyDeleteAh, the McDonald's hot coffee. I remember thinking, "Who doesn't know that hot coffee is hot?"
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