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Shame! Text-to-speech disabled for Toni Morrison’s ‘A Mercy’—plus a bunch of other Kindle books
May 13, 2009 | 9:09 am
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By David Rothman
Does Toni Morrison, the great Nobel Prize-winning novelist, know?
A Mercy, her 2008 best-seller, now has text-to-speech disabled in the Kindle edition.
This is happening to other Amazon books, too, as noted in MobileRead. “A more-or-less random scan of popular novels in the Kindle store” revealed that “14 out of 42 books” had T-T-S disabled.
But I’d especially love to know Morrison’s thoughts, assuming she is aware of the action. Did she approve? As a social progressive, how does she feel about the needs of the disabled?
And what does Oprah Winfrey, through whom Morrison became so popular, think of this latest technological “progress” and assault on fair use?
How about the value of T-T-S to help disabled people read or lean to? Or is this just a pocketbook-only issue for authors?
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Comments:
Vote with you wallet. If you buy a book from Amazon, check it immediately for TTS being disabled. If it does not work, return it for a refund as being defective. They will get the picture if enough of us do that. On the other hand, if the returns are zero, we do not have a case for getting this onerous limitation removed.
Amazon is displaying “Text-to-Speech: Not enabled” below the price for affected titles in the Kindle store. The community should tag these titles as well. Any suggestions?
Al, can you return an ebook? I tried to “return” an ebook to Waterhouse recently.
Their site has information that their books are formatted for Sony Reader. I did a Google search for a certain book. The search took me to a page devoid of such information, the page for that book. After buying the book I discovered that I can only read it with Adobe software on my computer but cannot read it on my Touch with Stanza. I wrote to Waterhouse asking for a refund and stating that I’d remove all traces of the book from my hard drive, which I would. We exchanged polite emails and now I am being ignored. I dislike reading from my computer. My book is imprisoned in my computer.
I know this is off topic. Sorry. With Amazon’s control tactics I simply roll my eyes.
Amazon’s policy is you have 7 days to call them and ask for a refund. I have done this only once when I realized I bought the wrong book. They gave me a refund and I deleted the book from my Kindle. They removed the book from my archive list.
I cannot use the Sony store because it is not open to Mac users. They have lost several sales as a result, but then that is their choice whether to have Mac users as customers or not. Meanwhile try opening the Sony book in desktop Stanza and converting it to whatever your touch can read. If it is protected with DRM that will not work, however.
Bill,
If you book does not have DRM (it probably does) then you can use Calibre to reformat it to a Sony format. Calibre is a free, open-source product here: http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download
Many ebook sellers have an official “no refunds” policy. This is partially because they have to pay the DRM provider for the download no matter what, and there is the question of knowing that the ebook has been deleted. It is often still possible to get refunds for defective ebooks, but not necessarily for choosing the wrong DRM.
Amazon is its own DRM provider, and can in principle check your Kindle to make sure the ebook has been deleted. So a liberal refund policy may be easier for them, but it is still praise worthy.
I have been surprised about how useful the TTS features is. As you might guess from someone who spends $400 on a reader — I like to read. Now, I prefer to actually read and not to hear the books.
However, its not always handy to look at the book, or to bother with turning pages. Every time I jump in the car I bring my Kindle along. It shortens an otherwise long commute as I listen to the book. When I get to my destination I go back to text mode and pick up from where I left off. When I go to the gymn, I place the Kindle on my exercise bike. Here I keep the volume low, but the read aloud feature also automatically turns pages for me, albeit a bit slower than I’d prefer.
In its way, this is like an extension of the whispersynch feature. It lets me ‘read’ the book in different formats as I move from place to place.
No, I won’t buy a book that has TTS disabled. If you only sell crippled copies of your work you will reduce sales. I wonder if piracy increases for those books that are not available in consumer-friendly formats?
p.s. David, did you see the interview from the Sony CEO (TechOn via engadget)? The engadget headline read:
Sony CEO Howard Stringer on music: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple”
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/11/sony-ceo-howard-stringer-if-we-had-gone-with-open-technology-f/
I think this marks the beginning of the end for TTS restrictions. If every high-profile book gets this kind of attention the bad rap won’t be worth it.
The TTS flag is EXTH record type 404, and EXTH records can be changed without removing the encryption from a DRMed AZW/MOBI.
I guess removing this record might still be “circumvention” as far as the DMCA is concerned, but Amazon really has not tried very hard to enforce TTS disabling. There is also an explicit anti-circumvention exemption for TTS in ebooks, but it is so poorly written that it is difficult to tell if it applies to Kindle ebooks.