Why Text-to-Speech is No Threat to Publishers

I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here. It seems that as soon as a product starts to evolve into something the disabled services community can actually use, publishers start crying fowl. Do they really think text-to-speech technology is costing them book sales?

Amazon has released some details on the Kindle 2, the highly-anticipated upgrade to their original Kindle, released just over a year ago. The Kindle is a portable eBook reader. Books can be downloaded from Amazon via a broadband Wi-Fi link, and taken anywhere. It is lightweight, can hold an incredible amount of publications, and has even evolved to the point of being able to download periodical media as well as traditional books. The new Kindle promises a text-to-speech function that might just give disabled users the ability to use the device. Details are still somewhat sketchy, and since the device has not been released to the market yet, we don't really know how accessible the device will truly be. But most AT professionals agree, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

But no sooner does the buzz escalate about the new Kindle 2 than someone from the publisher side goes all crazy and screams infringement. In this case, it's the Author's Guild, whose director, Paul Aiken, states:

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

Being a provider of alternate format, I can tell you that no one wants to have to listen to the electronic voice of a text-to-speech conversion unless their disability requires it. Even the best voices still sound monotone, despite some of the recent advances in voice technology that have occurred. If you don't need text-to-speech, you won't be using it, I can pretty much guarantee. Listening to a book via text-to-speech technology is not the same as having an audio book. Audio books are highly produced, using a human reader. Most of us have experienced traditional audio books in one form or another. Text-to-speech, as good as it is, is not ever going to replace traditionally-produced audio books for the majority of listeners.

Now that I am a member of the board of the AccessTextNetwork, I hope that we, as DSS providers, can explain and show publishers that text-to-audio is no threat to their bottom line, and that this technology is making more and more resources accessible to persons with all types of disabilities. No one is stealing anything, no one is trying to steal anything. We are just trying to give our students equal access to information.