“Andrea” (if that is your real name!) gave me a great opportunity in the comments to the last post to demonstrate both the uncanniness of the acousmatic voice, as well as the possible legal difficulties attending it. She (if that really is a woman! Or perhaps an Italian man?) recounts the uncanny experience of hearing Alan Liu speak at a conference and thinking “hey, that guy sounds like the “Fitter, Happier” robot voice.  Well, here at Inter Alia, we believe in re-creating the full experience of your ordinary life—invading it, as it were—and duplicating it electronically and mechanically. In other words, we have already met you. At your house. In fact, we are there right now. Call us.

There we go—now I have just deprived a fellow academic from any possible royalties he might receive on an audiobook version of this text. His speech is now free—it was already free, of course, but now it’s, uh, freer.

So, let’s review: on the one hand, as Roy Blount argues, “bundling” audiobooks along with ebooks is unfair because:

1. •ebooks have never really caught on, but audiobooks are popular
   

2. •audiobook rights are more valuable than ebook rights
   

3. •audiobooks are a growing segment of publishing, unlike paper books
   

4. •“automated” reading is going to get better and better until it is indistinguishable from a real human—the “acousmatic voice”
   

I think that these are all strong arguments, but I’m still opposed to the writer’s guild’s stand against the Kindle’s read out loud capability. Why? Largely for the very same reasons, all of which are reminiscent of the debate we had over DRM (digital rights management and music). I say a debate we had, because that debate is largely over. The right to make an infinite number of perfect digital copies of a song I had bought on a CD, including being able to re-encode the song into any other format I liked (.mp3, .aac, .mp4, .ogg, .aiff—whatever), and further being able to digitally modify the song (using it for samples for other songs, doing mashups, etc.)—well, those rights, said the music industry, are clearly separate and more valuable rights that users will have to pay more for. In fact, in most instances, the music industry regarded those rights as so valuable that they weren’t for sale at any price.

Like automated reading, people initially scoffed at the quality, too. No one, they argued, will want to listen to these poorly compressed audio files—and they’re huge and take so long to download over my ultra-fast 28K modem connection!  Blount learned from the music debacle that the quality will always improve and the download speeds will always get faster. It’s just a matter of time before your computer can read you bedtime stories doing all the funny voices for each character and added sound effects.

Over the last decade or so, just as with music and video, etexts have started to proliferate on the internet. People don’t like reading novels on a computer screen very much, but they’re starting to learn to, just like a whole generation of kids learned to do what the TV industry said they’d never do—watch TV on the computer. I don’t know how many Inter Alienists realize this, but most people under 25 watch most of their video content—films and TV—almost exclusively on their laptop screens now. Many have no idea what channels their favorite shows air on, and they watch them without commercials. The same thing is beginning to happen with etexts, and my son is happily reading through the unabridged 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on my his iPod Touch.

So here’s what happens next:

More and more books begin to circulate on the web in electronic form, easily available for free, in higher and higher quality formats. Software appears that displays these texts attractively and formats them automatically, with a pleasant and intuitive interface. Or better still, the “killer app” appears that makes these files really attractive and useful—perhaps by reading them out loud. A device appears—perhaps the Kindle, perhaps something else—that allows you to carry all those texts with you, all the time. A centralized store appears, allowing the easy purchase of text content over the internet, any time, from anywhere. All of this is what happened with music (.mp3 files, iTunes, iPod, iTunes Music Store), and as they say on Battlestar, “all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”

Steve Jobs said before that Apple was uninterested in making a Kindle of their own because “people don’t read.” That’s a brutal thing to say, but it’s largely true. 1/3 of American high school graduates never read another book in their lives. 1 in 4 American read no books at all last year. Those who do read tend to be older and female, and they tend to read religious works. This does not paint a healthy picture for the future of reading or of books in general. And almost all of the statistics show a fairly steady historical decline. I hate to say this, but the future of books, fictional texts that people consume for enjoyment, that structure their fantasy lives, that contribute to their sense of who they are? For books like that, the future may largely lie in audio.

And thanks to Google Books, file sharing, and free services like Project Gütenberg, most texts are now available on line. Once they are out there, anyone can copy, paste, and go the Services Menu on the Mac and tell the computer to read it out loud to them. Once the really awesome reading software of the future arrives, and the hardware device that handles it seamlessly is here, we may all be carrying around “10,000 books in your pocket.” Not to read, but to listen. Lots of speech, but will it be free?

It’s hard to say, but experience with the music and video file-sharing revolution of the last ten years suggests that yes, it will be. Many users will pay, but many won’t. But the main lesson learned from the music revolution is that nothing will succeed at limiting the technology. If the writer’s guild keeps reading out loud off the Kindle, then all they will succeed at doing is driving the technology to the computer. And then someone will release some software that turns any etext you find into a high quality .mp3 file you can play in the car on your way to work, and that’s all she wrote. The Kindle was just an intermediary, anyway, because—as Steve Jobs said—people don’t really read anymore.

UPDATE

It would be cheaper for The New York Times to give a Kindle to each of its subscribers and have them download the paper for free every day than it is for them to print the paper for a year and deliver it to those same subscribers. Ouch. In fact, it would be less than half the cost according to this analysis.

UPDATE BIS

Amazon, perhaps inevitably, has caved in to the writer’s guild demands. I say “caved” because, as I’ve argued here, this is a battle that they’ve already won, even if they don’t realize it. The writer’s guild would have done better trying to renegotiate a higher fee for their ebook rights that includes text-to-speech, since we’re going to get there—if not now, then in ten years. They’ll make more money tying to facilitate this transition than they will by opposing it. Just ask Apple, who owns the #1 music store in the US today.