Kindling Outrage Around the World
In this second posting in my series on access by blind people to everyday published information, I will look briefly at the situation that developed earlier this year when Amazon released its Kindle 2, and what we learned from that.
Amazon is a well-known publisher of electronic books or e-books. These books are electronic files you read using a portable electronic device often called an e-book reader. In Amazon’s case, their reader is called the Kindle. The second iteration of the Kindle, the Kindle 2, was released in February this year. This caused considerable controversy in the blind and intellectual property communities as I will explain shortly. To my knowledge, the Kindle experience is so far only available in the US because of various import/export laws and other restrictions.
The concept of the e-book aims to deliver much the same reading experience through electronic means as people get from reading a printed book, paperback, newspaper or magazine, except that the typical e-book reader gives the advantage of being able to read many thousands of books through the one portable device. The more recent Kindles have a screen that even attempts to emulate the look of ink on paper. So the basic idea is that you choose something to read and it comes up on the screen, and you essentially read it like you would a piece of paper. The controls on the unit let you turn pages and move through the text at will.
The Kindles have built in memory for holding a large number of books and they also work wirelessly so you can access books and other content directly from Amazon. And you don’t even have to have your own internet service because Amazon makes this available directly to Kindle users by an arrangement with a major US telecommunications company.
The idea of course is that the customer buys content from Amazon, and reads it on this highly portable reader. As long as the customer is in a coverage area (rather like using a mobile phone), they can switch on and directly access Amazon to get more content and, I believe, surf the web and access other information as well. Of course Amazon is not actually the publisher; no doubt they in turn pay publishers and authors for the rights to publish their content in this way.
The Kindle 2 introduced a new innovation into this fast changing world of e-books, built-in high quality text to speech. This means that when you open up an e-book to read, instead of reading it on the screen, you could make the Kindle 2 read it to you in its synthetic voice. Text to speech technology has tended to be rather specialised. It is used a lot by blind people when we access information on computers, and also quite extensively in telephone-based ordering systems. The technology has developed amazingly in the last twenty to thirty years, but it still does not really approach the qualities of a professional narrator who can deliver human emotion and expression that is appropriate to the content. But text to speech is certainly much better than it used to be, and it has become very affordable, and Amazon clearly saw benefits in bringing it to its customers. They would be able to read books in the car while driving, for instance, well, you know, while still keeping their eyes on the road.
There is already a growing and competitive market for audio books. Some people who really want to have something read to them in the car have demonstrated that they are willing to pay a much higher price for that privilege. You can well imagine the concerns of audio book publishers when they realised that a device like the Kindle 2 could seriously erode their sales, because it would let people pay just the standard fee to Amazon to get the book and they could then choose whether to read it on the screen or have it read to them by the machine itself. Sure it might not match what a good narrator could do, but on the other hand almost any book available to Kindle users could be read this way, ie there would be much more choice than the audio book market currently offers.
It seems that Amazon, naively perhaps, may have under-estimated the significance of their new text to speech functionality when they released it earlier this year. Ironical perhaps when you realise that Amazon also sells audio books. The Wall Street Journal quoted the Authors Guild’s Executive Director, Paul Aikin, as saying “they don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” The essence of what he was saying is that any reading of a book out loud is a potential infringement of copyright. Of course their stance sparked howls of outrage as people pondered on the possibility that even reading bed time stories out loud to their children might be a breach of copyright.
The blind community immediately took a stance based on human rights, upholding the principle that we should have the same right to access published information as sighted people. The President of the National Federation of the Blind said: “blind people routinely use readers, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio. Up until now, no one has argued that this is illegal, but now the Authors Guild says that it is. This is absolutely wrong. The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright.”
So here we all were, ready for a major slugging match that might really have defined our legal rights. But then, Amazon gave in. Remember Amazon’s business model relies on cooperation with authors and publishers. In the end, they agreed that publishers would be given the facility to disable the Kindle’s text to speech function so it can’t be used on their specific content. So the matter was concluded on the basis of commercial reality, leaving the battle over the important legal principle it raised to be fought another day.
Blind people dream of a world in which we can have access to the same information as what sighted people already enjoy. When I was younger, we just accepted that it was physically impossible for us to read, so we made do with the assistance of others to do the reading for us. But that was before today’s world of information being published electronically. Nowadays, virtually everything that is published has come from a computer. The development of the e-book and the ability to pay for content directly through a system such as the one run by Amazon means people can completely bypass paper altogether. All the technology building blocks are now in place that let me as a blind person order my copy of today’s best seller from an online publisher and have it transmitted to me so I can read it with my choice of technology. It can even be secured so that only I can read it, in case I should be tempted to pass copies to other people. But can I access all the books out there? Well there are some organisations that make this possible for a limited range of titles, but generally speaking the answer is no, I can’t.
In essence, the reason today why blind people can’t read the same books as everyone else is not because books are published in print and it is physically impossible for us to read that. Nor is it because technology hasn’t developed enough. NO, the barriers that prevent us from reading much of what is published are man-made. They arise from the fundamental changes taking place right now in the way content is published.
First, while there certainly are open standards for e-books, the big publishers like Amazon use proprietary formats designed to ensure that you can only read the content they make available through their equipment. Compare that with the traditional physical book. Once a physical book is out in the community, it can be read by anyone with good eye sight who knows how to read. It can be loaned to your friends and passed on to others at used book stalls; in fact one physical copy might last for centuries and be read by hundreds of people. But that’s because when you buy physical books, you own them and they are self-contained. You might not be legally able to copy them but they are still your books and physically you can do with them what you want. But that is not so true for e-books. The new approach, now made possible by today’s technology, is that you don’t own your book; you simply own the right to access it using prescribed equipment that is under the on-going control of the company that sells you the content. This is not something you can easily lend or even sell to someone else.
The big publishers now have an ability they never had before to control access to their content right to the end user. So we’re seeing a battle between the big players in which each one hopes to corner the lion share of the market. The same technology revolution that has the potential to open up the whole world of information to blind people has given publishers new ways to slice and dice their content into different formats targeted specifically to different markets and specific regions, and it gives them much finer control over who can read that content and by what means they can read it. As the wider community warms to new technology-based ways to read, publishers now see new ways to clip the ticket thus creating new revenue streams. And the race is on to see who can corner the biggest share of the market.
In essence, this development has only been a reality for a short time and as a global society we have not yet developed a social consensus on what constitutes acceptable behaviour. The laws that control this activity are grounded in commerce and copyright, but in my view the traditional copyright laws are inadequate to deal with today’s reality because in the past there has always been a degree of separation between the way content is produced and the way it is consumed. The new technology takes away that separation, and society as a whole must consider the consequences.
At the same time, the blind community now considers that the right to read is a fundamental human right. The World Blind Union launched its Right to Read campaign in April last year. We are not demanding a free ride. The catch phrase for the World Blind Union’s Right to Read campaign is “the same books at the same time and at the same price as everyone else”. It seeks to persuade publishers to openly include the blind community in their markets, and they encourage the adoption of new copyright exemptions to promote the availability of books in accessible formats throughout the world. That will be the subject of my next blog.
Tags: access to information, accessibility, accessible format, Association of Blind Citizens, association of blind citizens of new zealand, blind, low vision, new zealand, vision impaired