Just returned from a trip to Brilliance Audio in Grand Haven, Michigan, where I had the chance to play for a few minutes with Amazon's new Kindle 2.0. (Amazon acquired Brilliance in May of 2007.)
The new Kindle has a sleeker design that's thinner and lighter than the original Kindle but also feels more solid. It has longer battery life, smoother controls, and an improved display. It really looks like a product that has come in to its own.
Also new to Kindle 2.0 is a somewhat controversial text-to-speech capability, employing technology from Nuance Communications, Inc. Originally intended to work with any text loaded onto the Kindle, the announcement of the feature briefly caused a huge stir in the world of publishing, when author Roy Blount, Jr., speaking as president of the Authors Guild, asserted in a New York Times Op-Ed, that Kindle's text-to-speech functionality constituted an unauthorized taking of audio rights for the written work.
“Kindle text-to-speech will
help the audiobook industry
more than it will hurt it...”
Blount is wonderfully witty, a skillful raconteur, a lover of language, and an irrascible defender of "what is right." In taking his position, he's doing what he must do as president of the Guild.
He's correct to point out that, "income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat." But, in my opinion, he overstates the case when he asserts that authors must be compensated for the additional value "that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books."
The question is: how much value is that, really? Kindle's designers seem to have intended the feature as a bit of a "gee-whiz" type of option. The idea is that it might afford busy, multi-tasking readers the opportunity to continue to take in information even at times when they have to take their eyes off the page -- while driving for example.
It's doubtful that one would want to listen in this manner for very long, but it's easy enough to imagine certain types of texts where the approach could be useful. Certainly people who use Kindle to read research reports and other professionally required non-fiction material could benefit, as could visually and physically impaired users (although the National Federation for the Blind has expressed concern about the accessbility of Kindle's visually based controls). The popularity of Kindle 2.0 in general and its text-to-speech feature in particular remain to be seen.
My own opinion is closer to that of Times technology writer David Pogue who -- the day before Blount's piece was published -- wrote a glowing review of Kindle 2.0 but noted:
But if you have visions dancing in your head of turning every book into an audiobook, forget it. The Kindle’s male and female voices are very good, but nobody will mistake them for the voices of humans, let alone the professionals who record audiobooks. Kindle voices have some peculiar inflections and pronunciations — they sound oddly Norwegian, sometimes — and, of course, they’re incapable of expressing emotion. They read Hemingway the same way they read Stephen Colbert.
At Brilliance, we listened to a sample read-aloud by Kindle -- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (available on Playaway in English and Spanish).
Like many reviewers, my immediate reaction was that the overall voice quality does sound quite good. But after a few sentences, I noticed that the delivery is about what anyone with a GPS unit might expect it to be -- robotic, free of interpretation, and -- despite the corporate name -- lacking in nuance. Words sometimes run together in an odd way, and the "Norwegian" sound that Pogue refers to is the singsong rhythm that sometimes results from evenly stressing words of varying syllabic length.
The general opinion of the people in the room was that Kindle text-to-speech will help the audiobook industry more than it will hurt it by expanding interest in and demand for spoken-word content. The bar may be set a little higher for human-read narrations -- if a commercial audiobook production doesn't sound appreciably better than a robo-read, then why buy it? -- but if the result is better-sounding human-read audiobooks, then audiobook listeners and the industry in general can both benefit.
In the end, the possibility of legal action by the Author's Guild was real enough that Amazon announced it will provide a mechanism for rights holders to opt out of text-to-speech on a title-by-title basis. They are positioning this as a "disabling" of the feature by rights holders. Currently there are some 225,000 titles available on Kindle. Only time will tell how many remain text-to-speech enabled and on what terms.
What do you think? Leave your comment below.
There are currently 240 Brilliance titles on Playaway, with dozens more added every month.
And by the way, Roy Blount's 2007 memoir, Long Time Leaving, from HighBridge audio, narrated by the author, is available on Playaway - click here for details.
