[4rgento]

In the future, people will look at these cases and shake their heads in disbelief. I hope the judges do the right thing here.

The publishers seem too attached to their licensing schemes. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech are here to stay and this is not a surprise for anyone. Publishers should catch up.

[corodra]

Um... so... you do know authors make a good amount of their money nowadays from audiobooks, right? Ultimately this hurts authors more.

Edit: I'm getting downvoted because I think authors should get paid for their work? Wow. Okay, ive been noticing the nature of hn has been going towards entitlement bs, but this is ridiculous. Why dont you clock in to your job and offer not to get paid for that week, and still do the work. Oh no? I wonder why...

[AndresToro]

Whats your logic on hurting the authors more. You can either buy the book or buy the audio book, someone is buying the book and having a separate technology read the book they bought with the fact that not every book has an audio version. So this opens up the possibility that authors without an audio book can still sell their digital copies to people with text-2-speech opening new point of sales to people who buy audio books.

That logic is the same as if you bought the digital book and printed it and the publisher suing you because it hurts their physical sales. If you buy a book it should be a license to print, translate, and text-2-speech, or whatever.

[accessibility1]

Um... so... you do know that blind people can't see the printed page, right? This technology opens up reading these books to them out loud. Requiring an additional license for people with a disability is pretty disgusting. Right now, I can share any books I download with my spouse, children, etc. But if one of them was blind and I wanted to share with them, suddenly I'd need a different license just for them? That doesn't seem right. The author's not going to get any additional money out of us, we'll just not read their book.

[matt_kantor]

FYI the feature being discussed goes the opposite direction: it takes audiobooks and transcribes them to text.

But your overall point still stands.

[fortran77]

Well, Amazon is making the audiobooks more useful. I think that's why you're being downvoted.