Audible forced to defend the legal difference between audiobook transcripts and, uh, "books"
Aux Features Books
Today, in the exciting world of niche legal battles over publishing giant turf wars: Amazon-owned Audible is being sued by a number of major publishers over its decision to include auto-captioning services with some portions of its library of audiobooks. And honestly, we love this sort of shit, because it’s the kind of thing that initially seems like a slam-dunk great idea—the transciptions are designed to help struggling readers follow along a few words at a time, complete with the ability to pause and get a definition of any word they’re having trouble with—but then someone goes ahead and points out that we already have transcriptions of audiobooks, and that those are called, uh, “books.”
Per THR, the lawsuit comes courtesy of pretty much every big publisher in the business—Chronicle Books, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster—who are pissed that they weren’t even consulted on the decision, and who are claiming that Audible is not only distributing the text of their copyrighted materials without the rights to do so, but that it’s distributing crappy versions of it, to boot. (The transcriptions are generated with machine-based speech-to-text techniques; Audible has reportedly admitted that their tech fucks up on up to 6 percent of words.)
Audible contends that this is all being blown out of proportion, and that Audible Captions are only there to serve as a reading aid, which is why they only display a handful of words at a time. (So, yes, you could copy the text of Moby Dick down if you were really looking to steal a very boring public domain text, but it would take you a not-inconsiderable chunk of your extremely finite life to do so.) Which has not stopped the publishers from saying “Well, you’re still giving out words that we own, but not in the format that you’re allowed to distribute them in, so: Lawsuit.” The publisher point of view seems to be that, if you want to read along with an audiobook, you had damn well better buy that text, too (and then sync it up through Audible’s Immersion Reading feature, if you like).
Christ, we love this nerdy shit.
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Some audio books are a bit different from the text, and give a unique experience from that text. So I can see this being a bit useful for hearing-impaired individuals (for instance, in the audio version of Carrie Fisher’s ‘The Princess Diarist,’ she has a few interactions with the sound engineers that aren’t–obviously–in the book, making the recording a bit more immediate and personal). But that doesn’t seem to be the point of this case–most audiobooks are literal in the most literal sense of the literary term. With a 6% audio-typo rate, I can see how it would piss off publishers.
Some audio books are a bit different from the text, and give a unique experience from that text. I know you are getting at something a bit different, but I just finished Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests on audiobook and, wow!, was it a great experience (and different than reading the text myself). Water’s novel is narrated by Juliet Stevenson, and her read is just fabulous.I am typically not a huge audiobook consumer ‘cause I don’t think much of most voice actors but, damn, Stevenson is skilled.
publishers got a point.
I’ve published five books (all available in audio) with one of these publishers and I’m glad they’re going after Audible for this. I don’t want error-ridden “captions” accompanying my audiobooks! Readers can buy the ebook or hardcover/paperback if they want “captions.” Amazon already offers a discount if you buy the ebook and audiobook together!
I think the included video is really interesting for two reasons.(1) I think it puts Audible in a bad light as far as this suit because while it distinguishes its “immersion reading” product and its “captions” product, they’re basically saying: “look, here’s a cool thing you can do if you bought both the ebook and the audiobook, you can sync them together!” and “hey, if you only buy the audiobook you can actually get exactly the same basic content, just with a little less flexibility, but you don’t need to buy the pesky ebook!” So that’s a problem.(2) The captions project is presented as an outgrowth of what they learned making all this tech available to high school students. While the guy in the video notes that the immersion reading product can be helpful for people with dyslexia or similar conditions (makes sense), the captions product actually came out of the students saying they wanted something to look at while listening to the audiobooks. Which also makes sense – they’re used to watching a lot of video, and I always thought the primary purpose of audiobooks [for sighted people] was to let people experience books when it would be inconvenient for them to be looking at a page. If the kids are just listening to audiobooks in their bedrooms or whatever, sure, they want something to look at. But you could also just as well flip the experience around: read the printed word and put some noninvasive music on, like millions of people do already. And though he doesn’t say they had data indicating the students wanted the captioned experience to improve comprehension (as he does with the immersion experience helping dyslexics), he then slides over to implying that that’s a great use for it, what with the ability to check definitions and such … again, putting them in the position of saying they’re selling a slightly crappier version of the immersion product and cutting the publishers out of that pesky ebook $.
Damn teenagers. I can’t concentrate on audiobooks and think about what I’m reading at the same time. Luckily 99% of my job is soul-crushingly brainless and repetitive. The 1% of the time that it isn’t, I have to hit mute.
Maybe. But if/when this hits the courts Amazon will point out that there is a market in the deaf communities for books that are out of print, the publishing companies won’t reprint them, and estates have only been able to authorize audio book versions.One big category is the old action adventure novels by authors like Barry Sadler, And William Johnstone. Their estates have books in this category, that the deaf can only read by using close captioning of the audio book, which makes this an accessibility issue.
I don’t see how the publishers could lose their case. To borrow from post, it looks like a slam-dunk for them and Amazon would be better served to settle and I’d start by conceding on the machine reading nonsense and offer to publish the actual text.With that said, the fellow in the video said that while the mega-corp was experimenting on school children, they found that “they want to listen to audio books the way they watch TV – with captions.” Neither of my teens watch TV with captions on the actual TV device or their desktop computers unless it’s a subtitled foreign language show and I just asked my son, he doesn’t use them on his phone. My question actually prompted a discussion and the idea sounds alien to him.Are using captions on TV something lots of kids do or just something Amazon said?
Pretty sure it’s just something Amazon said. Idk any kids who watch tv with captions on, not even my kids. They watched a lot of captioned tv because their dad has hearing loss (severe enough to need hearing aids) and needs the captions when he watches anything, but when they were watching tv alone, they never had the captions on.
My teenagers sometimes watch Netflix shows with captions (no one in the household is hearing impaired). I don’t think they’ve been doing it intentionally, though, as much as someone’s accidentally turned them on a few times and they generally weren’t bothered enough to turn them off. One of them does like to listen to the audiobook versions of her school reading assignments while simultaneously reading the books, so there’s that.
I’m one of those people who reads pretty much every word that comes within their field of vision, so though I’ll occasionally use captions on rewind to see what a character said or if the sound quality of a scene is crap, I can’t just leave them on the screen. If I do, I can’t help but to read every word and then I don’t really look at the picture or watch the show. When captions are accidentally turned on, I can’t turn them off fast enough.
I’m a long time fan of foreign films so I got good at watching while read caps. It’s not my preferred method of watching most things but I can see both sides of the argument
When I’m watching a foreign film, it’s necessary to do both. What’s bothersome to me is like when I’m watching something in English and the caption “hey bud” appears at the same time or a split second before the sound, so my eyes are drawn to the unnecessary words and not the person saying it.I tease that my daughter watches Japanese cartoons dubbed into Spanish with English subtitles, but that’s her way of keeping her ear for Spanish, so it’s a necessary part of the equation like when I watch a French film.We both turn the captions off when we’re watching something in English, so I think Amazon’s claim that their subjects watch television with the captions turned on is describing only a small percentage and it’s no where near as ubiquitous a preference, as wanting to listen to audiobooks on a phone.
I know people who do it.
Somehow Uber and Lyft have convinced regulatory authorities everywhere that even though they are being paid per trip to drive people from place to place, they aren’t a taxi company and don’t have to abide by those regulations.So anything is possible.
I used to do to that as a kid but I don’t know if I was the ‘norm’. Eventually I got into anime though and being used to having subs on screen was a plus.
I know it is something that people around my own age(29) and older do but never have heard of kids doing it.
I don’t know about kids, but anime fans and video game fans are very likely fans of subtitled text on screen. For anime, any sub purest would have to insist on it (and even in the dub, you might need translations for signs or menus or what have you from the art). For games, audio mixing is so questionable and the player moves through the world at their own defined pace, so subs make sure the player won’t accidentally miss dialogue made inaudible by environmental sound, voices talking over each other, or by leaving the area just before or after dialogue occurs.
This Won’t be a slam dunk. Audible has a library of books that are only available in audio format. So if the deaf want to “read” them, they would need this feature, which is another reason that Amazon implemented it.
To quote a brilliant song’s words of wisdom: “Take a look, it’s in a book!” Also, if you give a hoot, read a book.
Tangential thread: for those of us who use closed captions
What’s your favorite misread CC?
Mine, from The Man From UNCLE (TV, not movie)
Agents discussing another agent who had a ‘mental crackup’, but the CC read ‘Lentil crackers?’
European hockey player names, by far.
A newscast I was watching at the gym rendered “white supremacist” as ” white sperm assist. “
Not necessarily a misread, but a very odd bit of phrasing: in an episode of Doctor Who Series 11, Graham sniffs his dead wife’s shirt. The caption simply reads:“he sniff”
A local newscast about the rising cost of weddings took “and that doesn’t even include the honeymoon” and typed it on the screen as “and that doesn’t even include the hymen.”
That is an all-time classic.
Watching a show about Greek mythology. Orpheus and Eurydice translated as Orpheus and Your Idiocy…
I see both sides of this: on one hand Amazon should have gotten its shit together before launching this instead of behaving rashly like tech companies all too often do… on the other hand this seems a bit silly given that there are probably very few actual sales that would be siphoned off because of this and it probably isn’t really hurting anyone.
I think it might promote a few sales. I wouldn’t normally buy from audible because my hearing is about as bad as that transcription – maybe worse than 6% confusion. If I could have the book read and also look at the tex on screen, I might be more inclined to buy. Yes, I now have the text on the TV most of the time. It started when I was watching British films and couldn’t understand what the hell they were saying, and we just kinda left it on after that.
It’s possible the people suing don’t want to leave the door open to other things if they don’t move on this.
(So, yes, you could copy the text of Moby Dick down if you were really looking to steal a very boring public domain textThis…is a very bad take. Moby-Dick is tremendously good.
I love this too, because I’m a connoisseur of schadenfreude and this entire dust-up dishes it out in great, heaping spoonfuls.I haven’t wished I could pop a bowl of popcorn and camp out in a courtroom so bad since Uber went to court earlier this year to enforce the exclusivity contracts they got cities to sign for their municipal bike-sharing program (or was it subsidiary?) Uber, the company literally. built. on the concept of disruptive competition with an established monopoly, saw someone doing exactly that to them, and their immediate instinct was to run straight to court. 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿This isn’t at all the same sort of situation, of course. (It’s better, because there are no sympathetic parties on any side of this. Much like a Samsung v. Apple or Oracle v. Google throw-down, I can just watch with guilt-free glee as two OP behemoths pummel each other remorselessly.)
I really wish you media outlets that like to make a big deal out of everythring would make some noise about the fact that it is impossible to buy an Audible audiobook for a friend.A couple of years back Amazon/Audible removed the feature. You can only gift an Audible subscription now. Not an individual audiobook.. This is SUPER lame and makes me feel like I’m pushing some Amway MLM scheme instead of someone trying to purchase a book as a gift.
Why does someone need captioning of an audio book. Isn’t the point that you don’t have to read it?
Because sometimes you can’t understand what the narrator said.