Authors Guild, “The Kindle Swindle”.
February 27th, 2009
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The Authors Guild thinks the text-to-speech capabilities of Amazon’s Kindle2 could be damaging to their audio book market. Engadget interviewed Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Authors Guild. They posed some interesting questions and of course Aiken responded as expected – defensively. Prior to this interview the Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr. wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. Take a few minutes and read through the two articles. I just can’t wrap my head around this.
This isn’t an actor reading. It’s a computer that sounds like a computer. I don’t think Harry Potter read by the USS Enterprise can compare to Grammy winner Jim Dale. The AG’s response to that would be, “Yet”.
ok, I just read both articles and words are words…. written or spoken. Just because a couple decades ago people found a way to make money selling audio versions of a book, doesn’t change anything. There is no real infringment here. The Author’s Guild is grasping at straws, when they should be embracing the inevitable change that is coming.
I think the AG needs to take a deep breath and try to understand what they are complaining about. I think the only people this might appeal to are people that can see in binary code.