James Delahunty
9 Apr 2009 17:58
Amazon's Kindle 2 made headlines throughout the world when it was introduced. Of particular attention was the device's decent text-to-speech feature. At first, the plan was for the feature to work with any text displayed on the Kindle 2. However, the Author's Guild saw this feature as a "performance" when used and pressured Amazon to allow publishers to decide on an eBook-by-eBook basis whether to enable the feature or not.
Whether this feature really threatens audio books and other sources of revenue is unknown, but for certain groups of people, this stance is simply not acceptable. At the end of last month, twenty groups representing visually and cognitively impaired individuals formed the Reading Rights Coalition. The group exists solely to oppose the action of the Author's Guild.
Among the members of the Reading Right Coalition are the American Council of the Blind, the International Dyslexia Association, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities. "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra," says the coalition's mission statement.
The coalition held its first protest outside the New York offices of the Author's Guild this week. The Author's Guild issued a statement in response. It reads, "The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights."