There's quite a dustup at the moment about an editorial the president of the Author's Guild wrote in the New York Times, railing against Amazon's Kindle 2, which has a text to speech feature that he claims creates unauthorized derivative works and should be stopped at all costs.
I'm not the only author who thinks this is ridiculous: John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Neil Gaiman all agree. (Um. Not that I'm comparing myself to them; they're just people I know, who I respect and admire, who also have a stake in this.)
Scalzi says: "I pity the person who thinks a bland computer text reading of Zoe’s Tale is an optimal experience, especially when Tavia Gilbert’s spectaular reading of the book exists out there to get. Yes, one is free and the other isn’t, but you do get what you pay for."
Cory says: "Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome
of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish
posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it
represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang
of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online."
Neil says: "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. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are
thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal
case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and
promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it."
But what if we're all wrong? As an author, performer, and consumer of audiobooks, what does this mean for me?
To find out, I picked a short passage from Sunken Treasure and read it. Then, I took the identical passage, and let my computer read it. I recorded the whole thing and put together something I call "Wil Wheaton versus Text 2 Speech" so you can hear for yourself.
It's about 5MB and just about 10 minutes long.
Download Wil_wheaton_vs_text_2_speech
Edited to add: My friend Jamais wrote an extremely insightful and thoughtful commentary
on the whole text 2 speech issue. He's really smart and you should read
it, regardless of where you currently fall in the debate.
Here's John Scalzi's rebuttal, which everyone should also read, and Neil Gaiman's final word which is also a must-read. Not that it matters, but I totally agree with both of them.
Also, this post has attracted a lot of traffic, and people are asking me about my own audiobooks. I'll point you to my virtual bookshelf, where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about all my books, including the audio versions.
Discover more from WIL WHEATON dot NET
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One very important thing to remember – folks with disabilities. My girlfriend currently requires text-to-speech software to remember anything she ‘reads’. Something like a Kindle would be great for newspapers or other material not available in Audiobook format.
Dr E
I have always loved the Text2Speech feature of the Mac, and with the new voices in Leopard it is even better.
C’mon, MacInTalk was an “actor” in Wall-E.
This guy needs a reality check.
Unless audio recordings actually sound like TTS, they shouldn’t worry. The value-adding is in the talent of the reader, and what it adds to the story. Generally, I’ve found that author-read audio is best, because it’s read out in the spirit it was written.
This fuss is another case of denying computer capability because there’s money (which will not be spent) to be lost. Keep up the noise, just as loudly as the publishers’ objections!
I love when people from a particular industry cause a huge disturbance for any form of new media that could potentially add new customers and bring additional revenue to them. Ask some of the smaller bands out there who owe their huge success in the late 90’s to the web how horrible napster was and they’ll laugh in your face.
Also, in the last two months I’ve just read Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book” and “Just a Geek” and I have to say, you are BOTH tied for my current favorite authors, don’t sell yourself short!
LOL!!! Alex is hilarious.
Also, sometimes I don’t understand who people still have their jobs when they’re so disconnected from their industry, and really, their jobs.
Well “said!” 🙂 I think the audio speaks for itself. More than the inflection and other human aspects to speech, when an author reads their work to me, it takes on a very personal and private tone. I feel like the author has written something that they are sharing specifically with me. I’m not sure of a computer will ever be able replace that feeling of intimacy.
The day a computer can match your subtle, nuanced, gripping readings is the day they have truly become intelligent… and probably become our evil overlords as well.
I dunno… I think they only make all this fuss because they (whomever “they” are in each instance) fear and/or do not fully comprehend the technology.
Which, really, makes them look like idiots.
If the Kindle was marketed solely as an accessibility device for the vision impaired, do you think there’d be such a fuss over it?
Nope.
It doesn’t matter what technology comes along, established interests want to kill any new features out of an irrational fear of losing some revenue stream or other. I can’t imagine anybody seriously believes a text to speech feature will kill audiobook sales (except maybe Stephen Hawking). I buy audiobooks to hear a performance, not to just get the words into my head.
Like some prehistoric beast bleating and wailing as it sinks into the tar.
I find it amazing that the Author’s Guild guy thinks that anyone’s going to buy his line of reasoning. I don’t see it happening yet.
I couldn’t have said it better. It’s ridiculous to compare an automated voice, at least with current technology, to any human reading for an audiobook.
Robert Sawyer, another author I admire, is saying that while it’s the case now that TTS isn’t comparable to audiobook performances, what will happen when it does reach that point? Will it be harder to fight that battle when people have been used to free TTS that keeps improving, or now, when it still seems faintly ridiculous to be arguing?
I’m not sure who’s right here. I agreed with Neil Gaiman when he posted the passage you quote above, but Mr. Sawyer’s also got a point w/r/t the future of TTS (http://sfwriter.com/2009/02/kindle-2-reads-books-aloud.html).
OMG – Stephen Hawking is reading your book! 🙂
Ya, the ‘human touch’ makes a big difference. Also the actor/ reader’s understanding of the subtle nuances of punctuation. And so much more. There’s even a big difference of you reading your own stuff vs. somebody else. It’s the great thing about art – how each interpretation adds to the greater whole.
I’m laughing at Alex. Is that the voice your iTunes uses when it argues with you? I love audio books and someday I will actually buy your books, that clip just made me want to more.
Text 2 Speech is fun and in some cases very useful. Not every book will have an audio format and some people can really benefit from text 2 speech. But it’s like the “Family Guy” episode where Stewie plays with his Mac; it’s amusing and novel for most of us but doesn’t replace the human voice and listening to an author or actor read the lines. An audio book is a performance, containing emotion and nuance that t2s cannot capture and cannot replace.
yea. I use a text to speech program to get my school readings ect done faster. and the voice I use to read me the stuff is so boring. and I like what I study. come to think about it, I’ve started listening to more podcasted novels since I began using the program.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop laughing when Alex said “dick”. =D
Anyway, I’d much rather hear a person read a book to me, rather than an inanimate machine. You get that human emotion and inflection, and it stimulates the imagination more than the computer reading. I also agree with what Quadropheniac said, in that it makes me feel that the book is being read to me, and me alone. It makes it feel more personal, at least to me.
You sir, have nothing to worry about. But now, I’m A LOT more interested in your audiobooks — well, played sir, well played.
Anyone else notice how Alex seemed to inhale at the beginning of a new sentence. Was it just me?
Dear God, make it stop. Ew.
The computer voice is fairly neutral, but it’s rendering of that text is awful. Some passages aren’t that bad, but some relaly grate.
Good job, thanks for sharing this. I agree with your approach–this is very silly. There are tons of more important things to be fighting about, for crying out loud.
Wow, you really miss a lot of the content when the text2speech is reading the book.
The one thing I would mention is that this technology stalled out like 15 years ago. If someone were to pick it up for the sole purpose of reading text from a book like yours, I think it would greatly improve, and my opinion would change.
Could it be that he’s fighting the fight of the future before the technology jumps ahead?
Couldn’t agree more. Most people who listen to audiobooks are not going to be satisfied with the current state of text to speech technology. I have been a long time fan of audiobooks and I have found that a good narrator can’t make a bad book good, but a bad narrator can destroy a good book. When a computer can reach the level of even a bad narrator then the Author’s Guild might have an argument, but not today. This is just silliness.
As someone with a disability, all I can think is I wish someone would make a speech-to-text device for all those web videos out there I can never understand.
If he’s worrying about crap like this, he’s got some serious self-esteem issues to think a text-to-speech render is going to put him out of business.
This stuff is important. Kindle better keep it.
Wil,
Just remember that without an ‘emotion chip’ no computer voice is going to match the tone, inflections or raw emotion of a human reader. How much more so when a text to speech program is up against a trained actor!? 😉
I know that for me, your books *require* your voice reading them, they just wouldn’t be the same without it. Where I *could* see an application is with textbooks/manuals etc. Business Mathematics is Business Mathematics even if its Wil Wheaton reading it…
Now of course even here there are exceptions…hmmm Salma Hayek teaching me Spanish or text to speech…what do you think? Or as the poster above pointed out (people with disabilities).
So in summary, for works like yours there won’t really ever be a real threat in my opinion or for any author with a modicum of personality in their voice.
You’ve just convinced me to buy all of your audio books. I love holding a book in my hand but if your audio books are anything like what you just sampled for us, I’m definitely missing out on a level I never thought possible with a book.
*gigglefits*
Was it just me or did “Alex” have a lot of Christopher Walken’s speech inflections in it?
“She was listening -=to=-….her walk-=man=-. It used these… -=things=-… called… -=cassettes=-….”
You know, it’s interesting; when you read it, it’s interesting and captivating and I care about how it ends. Mechanically read, I find myself totally losing interest.
If I tried to use text-to-speech for, say, the novels I have to read for classes, I don’t think it would be able to hold my attention. Ditto anything for pleasure, then.
No contest.
Wil-
I’ve recently experimented with reading for audiobook purposes, and I must say I’m impressed. If that really was an unedited segment of you reading aloud … wow. I find that no matter how familiar the source material is, I still stumble every other paragraph or so.
Repetition for clarity or mistakes takes time. Reviewing takes time. Editing those repeats out takes time. Conversion to a final format takes time. I’ve done some basic metrics, and I find that I get “production quality” spoken word that is roughly 1/3 of the time I put into it — for every hour I work on it, I’ll get 20 minutes of MP3.
You made, what, 2 or 3 mistakes over a 4-minute read? Very nice.
We’re talking about the distant, distant, distant future, I think.
A lot of actors had a collective freak out when the animated Final Fantasy movie came out, but after watching five minutes of that I didn’t feel threatened in any way. How long ago was that? And how many actors have been put out of work by a digital recreation?
The fact is, humans are superior to machines in a lot of ways, not the least of which is our ability to, you know, feel things, which is as fundamental to performances as oxygen is to breathing.
Wil — I think that your comparison is based on a short-lived premise, much like the film/tv execs who spent 5 minutes looking at postage-stamp sized QuickTime 1 images in 1995 and laughed at the idea that anyone would ever bo so foolish as to want to watch video on a computer over the internet. Does current TTS suck, compared to Jim Dale reading Harry Potter? Sure. Will that always be the case? There’s too much value in TTS for reasons going way beyond audiobooks for a large number of very smart people to not keep working on the problem. (and in reality — how good does it really have to be?)
That being said, I also agree that the Author’s Guild’s position here is ridiculous, for a raft of reasons.
Well, it helps that it didn’t look much better than PS2 cutscenes. Now, “Beowulf” looked AMAZING, but nothing beats a real actor.
(Note: I still really loved “The Spirits Within.” *is a glorious FF fangirl*)
Well, for what it’s worth, I welcome our robot overlords. Alex did an okay job reading (distracting and erratic, but not as bad as a Speak ‘n Spell) but if I had a choice between listening to a TTS program read the book for free or buying a version that you read for a fee I would hands down buy the version read by you (or any other talented voice actor). The idea that TTS is going to take money out of the industry is ludicrous.
Also, I really like that story.
Cheers.
“In fact, publishers, authors and American copyright laws have long provided for free audio availability to the blind and the guild is all for technologies that expand that availability,” says Blount.
Clearly, he has not seen the clunky, gi-normous, tape-played product that is free audiobooks for the blind. The blind don’t get to read today’s New York Times while riding to work with anything that’s provided for “free.” Really good portable readers are pretty expensive, from what I understand. Blount’s basically defining as an audio product anything that makes reading too easy.
The really weird thing is that the reader still has to buy the text in order to have it read – is Blount trying to charge the reader twice (for the e-book and the reading)? Is the writer’s take for an audiobook better than his percentage for an electronic edition? I don’t get what he’s trying to accomplish when he talks about a “fair shake.”
But the Guild might win something as it ramps up its arguments. Somebody yanked all the gold fillings out of Lexis-Nexis years ago in spite of the fact that it’s an internet version of library microfiche.
Yeah, I thought that was the coolest thing about Alex. It’s still not quite a “he” but it’s a neat trick.
I think the following post from Neil proves the most poignant to me. Just on the merits of making books accessible to others the Kindle’s text2speech is a winner in my book. If you haven’t read the post, read it, internalize it, and make your own call.
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/02/zoom-zzzzoom.html
You know, I own your books but hadn’t gotten into audio books. And like some others here – this sample immediately makes me want them all.
The robot voice gives none of the essential pauses, intonation, and all the subtle nuances that exist in storytelling. Because it is that – it is not speech, what you are doing is storytelling and that cannot be done by a robot.
Thanks Wil.
I am not an author… yet… but I agree with all of the above. It’s not a threat at this time and the guild really is overreacting.
And as another unpublished author I know notes, “The day that computers can read text aloud to rival humans is the day they start asking for a paycheck.”
Probably have to pay them in bandwidth or something.
The guild isn’t using its head. A derivative is legal as long as it gives credit where it’s due, ie, based on characters created by,etc.
Reading aloud, either by computer or human is not a derivative of any type, as it doesn’t change how it is put into print, just the quality of hearing it read. Two humans reading the same story aloud would have the same effect, for example, Pauly Shore compared to Morgan Freeman. Audio books have appeal, even for those who love to read, for the simple fact that there is no comparison for the way an author reads his/her own work.
As writer trying to break into print, I see no threat here. Kudos to you Wil for showing us how wrong the guild is.
This is hilarious, today. I suppose the only real danger is if you allow it now, someday the text to speech technology will become awesome (we all know it improves) making it a real threat. Do you want to nip it in the bud now, or try to fight it later. When the awesome new technology becomes common and everyone already has it, it will be much harder to fight.
I understand that argument, but to me it’s a lot like saying, “Look, VCRs aren’t everywhere now, but we in the film industry should do whatever it takes to kill them before they gain a wider share of the market.”
Is there anyone who can reasonably argue that VCRs have hurt the film industry in any way?
Or am I nuts, and this isn’t a 1:1 comparison?
I wonder what the reaction would be if the technology was reversed. What if the device required the purchase of Audio books but had a speech-to-text function (like closed captioning)?
This has to be the awesomest thing you’ve done since … well, OK, you just did the PDF release, so that kind of messes up the curve.
I think your point is well-made, if for no other reason than the absolute hilarity that was “Alex” saying “Crazy on the cocaine.”
I heard a kindle-voice reading the Gettysburg address, and it actually is more lifelike than Alex. But it’s still got nothing on a real voice actor. At its best, the Kindle reader sounds like a bored substitute teacher that’s been told to read a passage to the class: there’s no life in it at all.
Still, as a person with reading difficulties, I find it frustrating that people are trying to lock up text-to-speech. Demanding royalties in this case strikes me as unlikely to make writers a bunch more money; rather, it strikes me as quite likely to lead to far fewer books being available in text-to-speech formats. And that means fewer books convenient to the blind, the severely dyslexic, and others with reading difficulties. When I brought up that point to Nathan Bransford on his blog, he said that there are already programs to get free and wholesale audiobooks to the blind and reading-impaired, and that a similar exception could be made for text-to-speech. As a person with reading difficulties who has never in my life received a free-as-in-beer audiobook on the basis of my disability, I question those programs’ ability to reach as many people as free-as-in-speech reading rights can.
Judging from discussing this with a bunch of professional (although german) writers, the vast majority (if not all) of them do not agree with the Author’s Guilds stance on TTS, calling it “stupid” and “ridiculous”. Just shows us how far removed from each other the artists and their so-called representatives are nowadays. Sad indeed.
You can’t stop things from changing. The desire to stop it is an understandable but fatal view. Corporate and individual history is littered with companies, nations and societies that refused to adapt and ended up fading away.
Progress, positive and negative, are a fact of life. Stifling innovation and progress merely because it doesn’t fit into the current view of “how things are” is futile. You might as well try to stop the tide with your bare hands. If this trade group is successful, at best all they’ll achieve is it being stopped in the US, and maybe a few other western nations. What about all the others where research, improvements and innovation will continue until the products they produce are life changing?
An example of stifling progress: Battery Technology. Exxon holds the soon-to-expire patent to a form of battery recharging technology that would enable large capacity batteries to be charged safely and easily within 5 – 10 minutes. Such a technology would have helped make electric cars viable a long time ago. Who cares about a 200 mile range when you can recharge in 5 minutes? Instead due to greed and a reluctance to change business models, a reluctance to adapt to progress and change we’ve been stuck with poor battery technology and a dependence on foreign oil.
Okay I know it’s hard to conceive text-to-speech as life changing and it probably won’t be, but the whole anti-change mindset should be fought at every bend. Once you start allowing the stifling of progress then you start to pay the price. Citizens of the world have for years due to patent laws in many areas.
Text-to-speech really is no different from how records were going to kill live music, radio was going to kill records, TV was going to kill radio AND the theatre, VHS was going to kill cinemas, easy-to-copy cassettes kill the music industry.. and so on all the way through to how internet piracy stops people paying to see films / TV shows.
Take Joost, Hulu and Netflix’s streaming apps, and the BBCs iPlayer in the UK, for prime example of how innovation is a boon to an industry that is supposedly being killed by the internet & piracy (despite profits continuing to grow.)
In every case the union or group that supports the relevant media has bleated and complained, dragging their heels in proclaiming that it will be the death of things instead of adapting and innovating.
If text-to-speech reaches a relevant stage, adapt and change your business model, or be left by the wayside as a relic. It’s as simple as that.
My boyfriend has dyslexia to the point that some of his textbooks are audio, and he hates it so much that he prefers me to read to him. I learned the value of audiobooks not long after we started dating. The inflections and style of the human reader, especially one who can give life to words, is far more valuable than any automated voice. Try reading the book of Jonah from the Bible in a storyteller’s voice, as though you’re reading to children(complete with sound effects). I’ll give you your money back if you don’t laugh.
I’ve worked in a few different industries and chatted with friends in yet others about this. Very rarely do we ever find the unions or trade groups represent the real view of those in the industry.
In my case I don’t like being in a union, but I pay my dues to be able to take advantage of their legal expertise and support should something untoward happen.
Maybe Wil got Stephen Hawking to do his Christopher Walken impression? Or Christopher Walken to do his Stephen Hawking impression? I’m not really sure which.
Oh no. I don’t mean to endorse the argument (I play devil’s advocate and bring up all sides). I guess I’m just saying I can see why someone would fight it and if you ever decide you do want to fight, it is much easier now than later. And kinda ridiculous.
I think it is a case of over-preparing. Like having an arsenal in preparation for an alien invasion as opposed to a simple survival/first aid kit. I mean sure, guns, food and water are all much easier to come by right now, but that doesn’t mean we should each horde an entire warehouse, just in case.
I think it’s above and beyond to accuse the kindle, I can just see him trying to set a precedent, albeit waay too early.
I’m not opposed to change. I relish improved technology and embrace it with open arms. I guess I could just, kinda, see where they might be coming from. I don’t support them in this in the slightest.
Well, if nothing else you just sold a bunch of copies of Sunken Treasure.
And quite right, too. 🙂