RantWoman just opened her email and came across another round of opinion about the new Kindle, this time from the self-proclaimed Voice of the Nation's Blind
NFB Response to Authors' Guild Statement on the Kindle 2
RantWoman herself has 5 or 6 divergent opinions about this topic so she is trying to figure out how one organization in far-off Baltimore can presume to speak for her, let alone for all the other opinions of blind people out there. Nevertheless, onward.
RantWoman has no reason to quibble with the National Federation of the Blind view about current audio reading processes and copyright law.
RantWoman agrees that it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to buy books as soon as they come out just like real people. Well, Amazon.com is happy to take RantWoman's money whenever RantWoman wants to throw it at them, but RantWoman insists on being able to do her reading on her own, independently, in the privacy of her own cave. Amazon does have audio books and RantWoman believes ebooks, but suffice it to say that for now RantWoman is not spending very much money at Amazon.
RantWoman fully supports the rights of authors and creative talent, blind or sighted, to negotiate the best deals they can get when publishing their work. RantWoman knows this is no mean feat.
RantWoman is a musician's kid and has complicated opinions about the audio performance issue. First, many blind people consume their audio materials at playback rates of speed that leave untrained listeners' heads spinning. Second there are big differences between sound produced by live humans and sounds produced by machines.
Speech delivered by humans, say live readers producing an audio book has many qualities including speed, tone, accent and other characteristics that can be quite important to the experience of reading an audio book. Speech produced by text-to-speech engines can have very different characteristics.
In addition, while listening to human voices at high speeds can produce severe audio distortion, RantWoman supposes based on limited impressionistic experience that TTS engines incorporate algorithms to preserve more of the features that make words recognizable without the distortion that would occur in voice files at high speed. Also, the underlying text is searchable in a way that RantWoman is not sure a current, commercially available produced audio book would be.
RantWoman supposes that while the Author's Guild advocates one possible approach to the audio rights issue, there might be some live audio book producers who could be put out of work. RantWoman would tell them fear not: there are many people who will still probably prefer human readers for many reasons.
RantWoman does not regret in the least failing to provide additional free consulting about the subject of keyboard shortcuts or spoken menus to the woman from the Developer Team that she met on the bus long ago.
RantWoman does possibly regret not being a competent enough capitalist or a scary enough intellectual property / ADA lawyer to tell developer team woman, look it's mumbledy-mumbledy HOW MANY years after the enactment of the ADA? Amazon is a how many billion dollar company with how many more than 5 employees engaged in interstate commerce in how many states? Do you perhaps have any blind people or people with other disabilities on your design team? Would you perhaps consider adding some because gosh darn it, it's time your products were accessible and it will be a lot cheaper to do that if you include diverse views early in the design process as well as throughout development and testing. Okay, so RantWoman knows some approaches to accessibility cannot just be instantly turned on like water from a tap and involve their own development effort, but....
Okay, so RantWoman strives to be a little calmer than this in person. Perhaps she should not try so hard. Meanwhile, maybe she will send this post off to a buddy of hers who is in fact an intellectual property lawyer and might possibly be able to make use of it.
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The press release of Feb. 12, 2009, from the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) at http://www.nfb.org/nfb/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=412&SnID=2093303179 does not provide a link to the objectionable "statement put out by the Authors Guild to its members[.]"
ReplyDeleteThe Authors Guild's Feb. 12, 2009, statement at http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/e-book-rights-alert-amazons-kindle-2.html does not make the outrageous claims denounced by the NFB.
Copyright law does make an exception specifically to give blind people access to books in useful formats. See http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#121 . Maybe the NFB could work with Amazon to create and distribute access codes, keys, or passwords of some sort so blind people could have legal access to automatic text-to-audio renditions through the Kindle 2, even when authors or publishers have not authorized release of an audio version (automatic or otherwise) to the sighted public.
THANK YOU for the link to the Author's Guild statement. Reading it has led RantWoman down roads to even further comment!
ReplyDeleteRantWoman was initially very perplexed by the self-proclaimed Voice of the Nation's Blind. The Kindle 2 could be made accessible to blind users. History, company size and all the standard tests for ADA applicability would seem to suggest this would be appropriate. Yet the self-proclaimed Voice of the Nation's Blind is fixated about one point of negotiation about digital rights.
But your comments and the Authors Guild piece put RantWoman in mind of several other points. First, RantWoman is scratching her head about the suggestion in the Authors Guild piece that reading bedtime stories aloud to one's kids could be a violation of fair use in the area of audio performance.
As a child, RantWoman loved being read aloud to by her well-meaning, literacy-promoting parents and she HOPES good sense will prevail about this particular question.
True confession: RantWoman's childhood was filled with another activity that probably gives copyright folks conniptions: helping her father photocopy out-of-print music to be used in musical performances in the ever so lucrative music studio recital church basement performance market. But before RantWoman's capacity for massive digressions overtakes her, back to the Kindle 2 and digital rights.
There are a couple different technologies on the market for making published materials accessible for blind people. One called DAISY exists in several forms of proprietary software or hardware with some caveats about whether material produced one way will be readable by other devices supposedly using the same standards. Another is used now by the National Library Services of the Library of Congress. Already this much of the story is more than enough to give RantWoman a headache.
RantWoman will have to do some actual research to be sure but she supposes that publication rights are administered partly in connection with dissemination of material in these format. RantWoman is also aware that the self-proclaimed Voice of the Nation's Blind has a history of jumping on technical standards they have a financial interest in. They of course are hardly the only organization in the country who does this and RantWoman is not sure whether it would be the Voice of the Nation's Blind or one of the other vendors with a financial stake in a particular technology standard, but the question is lurking on the landscape.
So what does RantWoman take away from all this?
--Several issues of digital rights appear either not to be settled or to be changing rapidly.
--Ditto for standards of production and distribution of content in digital media as well as for reproduction / consumption of the digital content.
--RantWoman neglected to say that some of the proprietary mechanisms available for the blind are either pricey or just outside of mainstream business in ways that they do not need to be.
RantWoman would really love to think about a Kindle 2 because of all the devices she is aware of the Kindle has a combination of price and bundle of services RantWoman actually wants. However RantWoman pays full price for enough gizmos she cannot use all the features of to demand more before plunking down her money. RantWoman persists in thinking this even though she really already has plenty of headaches thank you very much and would never mind just being able to walk in and have the same choices as anyeone else.