Jeremiah Tolbert

Some authors have posited that hav­ing an ebook reader able to con­vert words into sounds on the fly is a good thing.  See Neil Gaiman.  Others have argued that such tech­nol­ogy should be cov­ered under audio­book rights.  And Wil Wheaton has cre­ated an audio com­par­i­sion between a human read­ing a book and the Kindle.

What a load of greedy bull­shit, and per­haps the most bone­headed idea to come along since those self-​​destructing DVDs called Div.     I’m a writer.  I like money.  I don’t get much of it for my work.  You would think that I would agree with any­thing that stands to make me more money, but I am not an insane greedy mon­key.  I am also a reader and a con­sumer and the think­ing behind this atti­tude is utterly ridicu­lous.  In case you haven’t fig­ured it out yet, I come down firmly on Neil Gaiman’s side on this.

This “par­cel out the means in which media can be con­sumed to squeeze out dimes” approach to lit­er­a­ture is going to do NOTHING but alien­ate con­sumers.  Here’s why:

When we buy a book, we believe that we can do what­ever  we want with it short of print­ing up copies and sell­ing them.  We reject any notion of tech­nol­ogy being used to arti­fi­cially limit our rights to media.  DRM is dead, just ask the RIAA.   We want to share and we want to remix.   It’s been demon­strated time and time and time again across all media.   You can­not fight the use of tech­nol­ogy to inter­act with media with more, evil tech­nol­ogy.  It’s a per­ver­sion of the nat­ural state and it NEVER lasts.  The sys­tem always rights itself.  The human infor­ma­tion net­work routes around things like DRM and arti­fi­cial rights as if they are dam­age.   All you do is frus­trate your hon­est con­sumers and waste money.

If it can be con­sumed by the human mind, it can be shifted, trans­lated, trans­mit­ted, and and all those other things that tech­nol­ogy inher­ently makes pos­si­ble and makes greedy bas­tards wake up in a cold sweat, afraid that some­where, some­one is using their “prop­erty”  in a man­ner for which they could have tried to rape your wal­let.  No.  We as con­sumers are not going to put up with it.   We haven’t been putting up with it.

When we buy an audio book, we are NOT buy­ing the book.  We are buy­ing a record­ing of a per­for­mance of the book.  It is a dis­tinct enough entity from a book that I believe the rights do deserve to be sold seper­ately.  But the text itself, that’s just one right, as far as I am con­cerned.  You sell me access to the text, and  I will do what­ever I want with it.  I will cut up your book’s pages and make a hat.  I will scan it with an OCR and put it in my per­sonal data­base.  I will even give the book away to a friend when I am done with it if I don’t want it tak­ing up space any­more.    You can’t stop me.  Publishing indus­try, seri­ously, with the decline of read­er­ship and sales, is this what you want to be spend­ing man-​​hours on?  Finding ways to LIMIT the ways that peo­ple can inter­act with your products?

With read­er­ship falling like a fuck­ing stone, with every­thing else that is going on today thanks to the Depression-​​like econ­omy, the pub­lish­ing indus­try has big­ger things to worry about than a text-​​to-​​speech func­tion, some­thing my com­puter has been capa­ble of since 1997!   Just because Amazon adds it to a ridicu­lously expen­sive e-​​reader doesn’t mean now it’s sud­denly time to hyper­ven­ti­late and claim that rights are being tram­pled and money is being lost.

If I was pres­i­dent of the Author’s Guild, I’d be focus­ing my energy on fig­ur­ing out how to get my mem­bers works printed on cereal boxes and bill­boards.  Massive dis­sem­i­na­tion, through any chan­nel I can think of.    I would be doing every­thing in my power to encour­age read­ing.  The money will fol­low if you just let peo­ple get on with the act of con­sum­ing the ideas.   We don’t mind pay­ing, but we will not be gauged repeat­edly for the access to the same material.

Anyone who thinks that the Kindle’s text-​​to-​​speech func­tion is more akin to a per­for­mance and less equiv­a­lent to show­ing some words on a screen–well, there’s not much hope for you as far as I can tell.  I hope you enjoy frus­tra­tion, because I pre­dict an awful lot of it in your future on this issue.