See, I have free time today between class and work. I also have a short story to finish but there were some news style items from the past week I wanted to highlight.
First off, HarperCollins is now just Harper, I guess. It was announced this week that the Collins division (and Bowen Press) would be shut down and the publishing duties distributed through the remaining imprints. Basically, it means that several executives/editors/probably a lot of underlings got the boot which always sucks but especially now in this reading less society with no foreseeable economic future that isn’t total ruin.
People are up in arms about the Kindle 2. And by “people” I mean authors…well, actually not authors but other people who profit off their work. For those that aren’t aware, the Kindle 2 has a text to speech capability that will read text out loud. The Authors Guild issued a statement to members that basically says they think it infringes copyright and, oh yeah, 1 billion dollars worth of audio books were sold last year. Here’s the best way to sum all this up and also allows me to “borrow” from my personal lord and savior, Neil Gaiman:
Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I’m going to summarise it here.
Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We’ve sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this.
My point of view: 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.
Which I will add to by saying, until a computer can read Harry Potter like Jim Dale (previously mentioned side note: fuck ABC for canceling Pushing Daisies…fuck them in their fucking asses!) then it won’t be the same thing…not even in the god damned ball park.
Lastly, a piece of San Francisco related news (thanks Mojo!). The annual Bay to Breakers will be fucking lame from here on out. The Bay to Breakers is, ostensibly, a race. This headline from an LA Times blog pretty much sums it up “Nudiy, beer won’t be tolerated at Bay to Breakers Race, Officials Say“. Look, the only reason for that race to exist is so that drunk/nude/costumed/crazy mother fuckers can run through the city. All those people who actually run the race to, you know, run it can run in another fucking race somewhere else. The city already killed Halloween in the Castro and now this. When the hell did San Francisco become so prudish?
The Darkness — Knockers
I think SF became more prudish when Gavin Newsom (sp?) started considering a run for Governor of California. He can’t have his “image” associated with these things. Of course this is all just conjecture on my part.
Exactly, when you purchase an audio book you purchase it for the person doing the reading. Granted, the Kindel 2 may actually sound like a real person but it is still going to miss the awesome inflections of someone like jim Dale
Actually, it sounds (from what I gather) like a robot, so I doubt it’s something anyone with, ya know, the capacity to hear sound, would want to listen to for more than a few paragraphs worth of text.
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