Journal

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Quick argument summary

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.

There.

Which I am putting up here to save everyone time asking me what I think. 

Just went down to the Beehives. Kelli-hive is doing brilliantly, Kitty-hive is still alive but I don't know if she'll survive the winter. 

I got a pair of Coraline Dunks in the post this morning. Batman 686 is out now, and if you want a copy you may want to buy it fast, and Andy Kubert is drawing like a madman right now to try and get Detective Comics 853 out, while keeping the levels of quality as high. And no, I'm not telling you what happens next.

Right. Workbacktonow=me.

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