The challenge for the book business for the past decade has been rapid and less-than-predictable changes in the ecosystem because of digital. There are two underlying shifts that fundamentally alter the ecosystem: people substituting ebook consumption for print book consumption and people substituting online purchase of printed books for buying them in stores. These two […]
The ebook TTS argument goes on
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 […]
Enhanced Ebooks, Part 3
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 […]
TTS and audio “rights”
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 […]