TTS

Random House came in for some ridicule last week because they have apparently disenabled TTS on ebooks they are giving away for free. I see this piece as nothing more than a cheap shot. Random House responded to the Authors Guild position opposing TTS by attempting to disenable it for the Kindle 2, as, we believe, other publishers will if it can actually be done.  If they are concerned about the authors’ wrath when the capability is on ebooks that were sold and on which the authors earned royalties, of course they’ll disenable it on the ones they give away too. What confirms this piece as a cheap shot is that there is no evidence presented that any other publisher takes a different position. Why single out Random House?

The author of another piece on the same subject is very gentle about the efforts “on behalf of authors” to block text-to-speech technology for ebooks, and in the Kindle 2 in particular. The authors’ position (to the extent that the Authors Guild and those literary agents who are opposing TTS actually represent the authors’ position) is just wrong. There is no evidence that any significant number of consumers buy books in multiple forms (the three main choices being printed, e-text, and audio). Even people who do both read and listen don’t tend to buy the book in two forms to enable that; they read some books and listen to others. Similarly, people who read both print and digital don’t try to do both with the same book. (What’s my evidence? Observation. But nobody has offered the least bit of evidence to the contrary and I haven’t met anybody yet who says “you aren’t talking about me.”)

So, in fact, enabling a digital file to serve two purposes would only increase sales by offering extra value. If that’s right (and it has at least as much chance of being right as the notion that there is cannibalization), blocking TTS is costing publishers sales and costing authors royalties.

I made the argument when this first came around three months ago that the TTS capability will be ubiquitously available so that people will be able to take any text they have and apply that capability against it. All Kindle 2 does is make it a bit more convenient. So this position is a fail on several counts. The fact that it is handicapping the handicapped is contemptible. The fact that it is denying authors and publishers revenue when it is supposed to be protecting them is just dumb. And standing in the way of applying developing technology to the benefit of all writers and readers can’t possibly be a sustainable position.

We did a quick check in this office for TTS apps. I think the Authors Guild and the agents should check these out.

• Adobe’s Read Aloud (for PDFs)
• SpeakText (for Windows)
• Last month, a Text-to-Speech Open-source API was announced by Android
• And there is a TTS iPhone App called “Acapela”

Are they planning to sue the consumers who acquire and use these apps? Are they really going to add to the burden of ebook publishing the need to find ways to lock up the text against all these technologies?

Thanks to all of you who viewed the Shift speech over the past weekend. It is disappearing from our site but is replaced by a link to a new annotation platform from our client SharedBook. If you have thoughts on the speech, that’s the place to express them. There are browser limitations to that platform which are posted with the link.

Share this post

This is the third and final post of a series which spells out a new ebook strategy for trade publishers, expressed in the form of a letter from the publisher to its authors. The first post — the beginning of the letter — expressed the publisher’s intention to invest in a database of digital assets to enhance all their ebooks, and to take advantage of the different opportunities presented by different ebook formats. It also was candid about how little the publisher really knows about what the revenue potential will be for ebooks. The second post covered the first item we anticipate the author will want to know: “what is an “enhanced ebook.”

This post covers the second and third items: what’s required of the author to get this done and what is the deal between the author and our imaginary entity, National Trade Publishing (NTP).

Obviously, there is only a limited amount National Trade Publishing can do to enhance an ebook without help from you and our other authors. So what do we need from you to really make this happen?

That answer breaks into two parts: things of value we think you have from the process of creating the book and value we think you can add after publication.

Do you have bibliographic material or sourcenotes that we won’t be including in the book? Have you archived links to source or related material on the Web? Did you write descriptions of characters or places in your book that you wouldn’t mind revealing, and which would be of interest as extra material to some of the people who will read your book?

We will give you the opportunity to contribute to each ebook’s underlying dictionary. Will you use it?

Video and audio material are welcome. You can talk to your audience about this book, or the next book you are working on, or even another book you’d recommend to them. We’ll give you guidelines for what we think will work best (brief, in a word) and we’ll be screening for adequate quality and appropriateness, but we want to give buyers a “From the Author” section of an enhanced ebook that gives you a lot of leeway.

We want to use the “space” we have in an ebook to tell readers more about the book you’ve written, about the world of the story (if fiction) or to give them a broader or deeper drive into the subject matter (if non-fiction). That can be done through your writing or by things you can refer us to, through things on which we can get the necessary rights to embed them or through things we can only link to. And through any media.

Which brings us to the trickiest part of all this: what’s the deal? (Blogger’s note: I am going to put some numbers in here. The numbers aren’t as important as the conditons and circumstances around the numbers.)

Our standard deal for ebook sales is to give the author 25% of the net amount received by National Trade Publishing.We’re not going to change that. We’ll pay the same on these enhanced ebooks, even though some of the material, such as the dictionary, will be provided by us.

In addition, we will ask only non-exclusive rights to the enhanced ebook material. If you write something original for this purpose, you can give it to us and then re-sell it as part of something else, as long as our rights to sell the ebook we’ve created are undisturbed. Although we certainly can “pull” material from an ebook much more readily than we could from a book we are storing in print in our warehouse, the administrative cost of doing such a thing across our list would be uncontrollable. (Hint: we can negotiate an ability to pull material if you pay us something to do so.)

We recognize the potential for advertising in an enhanced ebook, or for promoting another book and benefiting by referral revenue from its sale. We will give authors veto power over accepting these revenue enhancements in their ebooks, and we will share 25% of the value of that advertising or referral revenue. If you bring us the advertiser, we’ll pay you an extra 10% of the revenue.

We will be entirely in control of the pricing of the enhanced ebooks, of course. Our strategic desire is to drive UP the price we can get for them, but, tactically, we may price them anywhere, or give them away in a promotion, or give them away as part of the ebook sale.

We’ll want to allow TTS use of the ebook wherever it is available, but we’ll block its use where we have that option at an author’s request.

So the “deal” we’re looking for is that we’ll each put forth extra effort to promote our still-primary product, your book, and to develop a better understanding of what the future primary product, the enhanced ebook, might be. We expect many of our authors to be enthusiastic about this idea from the beginning, and for many of the others to join with us gradually as we develop this concept. We hope you’ll be our partner in this effort from the start.

PS: Since I started this series of blog p0sts, I learned about a peer-reviewed study of ebooks created by John Warren of the Rand Corporation. John’s article is very thorough and reviews important points about ebook capabilities, including hyperlinking and multimedia, and about pricing experimentation that are not covered in my series of posts. However, it does not cover what I consider to be the central point of my pieces: which is that a publisher needs to set up a database and a new interaction with authors to really move into the ebook era. The book-by-book approach, which is normal and which is what the Warren piece also assumes, will not be cost-effective for consumer ebooks for some time, perhaps years.

Share this post

There are credible voices in the publishing world saying that the text-to-speech capability of Amazon’s new Kindle 2 constitutes a threat to the value of authors’ audio rights. 

The most extreme interpretation of the Authors Guild position is that protecting audio rights would extend to prohibiting parents from reading to their kids!

But the most recent voice taking issue on behalf of authors, Roy Blount, Jr. in this morning’s NY Times, explicitly rejects that “extreme” position.

Although I’m not a lawyer and even before Blount’s piece I didn’t take the hysteria about “reading to kids” terribly seriously, I find the authors’ basic position so logically dubious that it couldn’t possibly NOT be legally dubious. On the increasingly famous Brantley list, where serious minds gather to discuss these issues, I was inspired to respond to the idea this way:

Amazon is not selling an audio rendition. Amazon is selling an ebook file, which there is no disputing their right to do. And they are selling a TTS program which can convert any text to automated audio, which they ALSO clearly have the right to do. It is the consumer that “mixes the cocktail” in his/her own home. So, whom are you going to sue?

I then postulated that it was only a matter of time before there was an iPhone app that could do TTS, and it would be sold or given away separately from any specific ebook content. Then what?

Joe Wikert is promulgating the same notion. He raises the concept of an app on the iPhone that does TTS. How long can it be before there are three of them available at the App Store? Or ten?

Acceptable TTV (text-to-voice), a qualitative step up from TTS, is right around the corner. (Blount makes clear this morning that he knows that.) So you’ll be able to sample Grandma’s voice and have her read to Junior. Or you can sample John Houseman’s voice and have him read to you! (Actually, I think I’d go for Red Barber…) This opens up a whole new opportunity for lawsuits, of course, because now you’ll have famous names (voices) reading to you without paying them royalties!

Publishers and authors better start planning for the day when audio income joins book club revenue on the legacy revenue scrapheap, both done away with by technology that made the old model obsolete. There are a few years to go before this happens, but it is looking inevitable.

So it is almost right to say that the Kindle is a threat to authors’ audio rights revenue. What is precisely correct is that technology is posing the threat. It does that. The blacksmith’s job wasn’t protected from the effects of the car. And the produced audiobook isn’t protected  from technology either.

Share this post