As a user focussed feature, it could read any audiobook out loud, and would differentiate apple books from any other audiobook platform.
I guess it's aimed at authors, because then they can charge the author for the 'narration' service....
Licensing. Audiobooks are a different license from ebooks, and trying to narrate an audiobook will infringe the licensing terms.
No author is going to win a twitter flame war because they don't want a 'speak it out loud' button provided by apple on their ebooks.
Besides - all ebooks on Apple platforms already support this via:
Settings → General → Accessibility → VoiceOver → ON turns on the VoiceOver feature
This is just a higher quality version of the same.
Books are one of the oldest media around and as a consequence most jurisdictions have fairly extensive and specific laws around them and their authors' and publishers' rights. In many cases copyright itself is ultimately based on laws created to deal with authors and publishers.
Infamously, Amazon tried to snub book pricing laws and lost. Google got into hot water with newspaper publishers because its news app violated laws originally written for citing physical newspapers.
This is like suggesting Spotify just ignore the RIAA or Netflix should just stream all content in all countries, licensing restrictions be damned.
You assume that it is authors who sell books on Apple platform (or on any platform).
Let me introduce you to a couple of chunky boys:
- Penguin Random House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Random_House
- HarperCollins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarperCollins
- Simon & Schuster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_%26_Schuster
Oh, it definitely would. This produces a derivative work besides anything else.
> It's not like they'd be saying "Here is this specific title for you to read/buy/rent", they'd be releasing a tool with the power to do that.
That's exactly what they will be doing from the point of view of copyright law.
TTS tools exist on all computing platforms these days. The difference with this recent release is just that it sounds better. Apple would not be creating a derivative work, whoever uses it would be.
EDIT: It has occurred to me that they may have signed a deal as part of Apple Books that says they won't release tools of this nature. I don't know if that is the case, but that isn't the scenario I'm talking about. Just the case where there is a tool that can do high quality TTS. I do not believe that violates any copyright since it's a tool.
EDIT: Also, since I can't get through the WSJ paywall, here is Amazon's complete statement from the time:
Quote:
Here is the full text of Amazon’s statement:
Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.
Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.
Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rights holders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.
Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.