Neil Gaiman (Coraline - The Graveyard Book) offers his 2cents on the debate over text to speech for the Kindle.
I think we are starting to see the end of Publishers(Publishers Row, NYC) and agents as more and more authors become aware that publishers and agents make it more and more evident that they only care about the money... (ebook pricing and text to speech are prime examples) not about the author or the reader.
I think Old School Publishing may soon take on the title of Gaiman's lastest book "The Graveyard."
I've reposted his article below; but here is the link.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Quick argument summary
Posted by Neil at 3:18 PM
Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I'm going to summarise it here.
Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We've sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this.
My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.
There.
Which I am putting up here to save everyone time asking me what I think.
No comments:
Post a Comment