Kindle Text to Speech
2 comments February 27th, 2009
Over the past few days there have been several people who have stepped up with their views on the Kindle’s text to speech function. The latest has been Wil Wheaton. Wil brings to the discussion the ultimate proof as to the risk the Kindle poses, by comparing his own reading to that of his computer. Anyone who can listen to this and still say that the Kindle is a threat needs to go back and listen again.
Ultimately though, this discussion is not about what the Kindle can do today but what it might be able to do in the future. Some will argue that in time the computer voice will be able to rival the human voice. This might be true and people even refer to computer animation as an example. However, even if it gets to that point I think you can look at animation as a good example here. You can not give a computer a script and say animate this and I believe that no matter how good a computer text to speach gets, you still need thought and understanding of the text to be able to put the right emotion and emphasis into the speach. This is not just a matter of a vice voice.
For me, however, this is not the whole story behind this. I see this as a fight between the old world publishing of books and the new technical world. Today technology is changing at an incredible rate and has changed they way we consume many arts. Music was once only available in live concerts and then came the radio and the record. This developed into the iPod and other MP3 players. The Theater and Plays turned to Movies and TV; then to digital movies that can be downloaded and streamed. These art forms and others adapted to the technology and were change.
This appears to just another case of the old and new clashing. Publishing has been fighting eBooks and changes. It comes down to two thing. The first is providing a product that people want, in the format that people want, for a price that is reasonable for both the consumer and the producer. The second is fair use. What do people have the right to do with a book they buy. For me a people has a right make derivative works of something they buy as long as they done sell it or distrubute it. Here is how Neil Gaiman summarized it:
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.
A writers end goal is to get there work into the hands of their audience in the form that the audience wants and hopefully make money doing that. If you provide people with what they want and you provide it to them in a mannor that it fair, people will buy it.
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