Read to Me, HAL

Sometimes people (and most especially interest groups) make it hard to stay on their side.  Too often positions get so entrenched that even those on the side of the angels become so hypersensitive that they turbojet well beyond the airspace of reason when defending their positions.  The RIAA in their rightful and legal defense of the intellectual property of the Labels they represent recklessly going on a litigation rampage, suing grandmothers and family dogs for downloading Britney Spears, the MPAA trying to nuke the VCR, DVD, and Digital Downloads because they’re sure it is the death knell of Hollywood, and of course a long history of crackball  politicians and religious hoo-hahs  with their Zippos at the ready for any book that threatens their own views.

And now we have a group near and dear to my own aspirations that have let their rights slip into their wrongs.  The Authors Guild have felt it necessary to decry Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-book reader for its text-to-speech function, claiming that it is a violation of the author’s copyright.  The advocacy group warned its members last week that this function would undermine possible audio book sales.

Anyone who has ever used any sort of Text-to-Speech functions know that recently the technology has gotten a little better than the early days of computers.  Though we’ve evolved from the days of Wargames’ WOPR synthesizer voice, we don’t have HAL9000 yet either.  We can’t even get computers to clearly speak our various languages, let alone perform the dramatics of a story.  Would it be cool for HAL 9000 to read to me?  Maybe, as long as I haven’t given him the code to the airlock.  But will his emotionless tone replace audio book performances?  Not a chance.  And that is part of what I am buying with audio books, the performance.  The storytelling.  And as heaven-sent as Amazon’s marketing portrays the Kindle 2, Robbie the Robot can’t do campfire ghost stories.

What the Author’s Guild betrays by this overreaction (“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Guild) is both an alarming insecurity and a distressing ludditism that signals sudden veer into the wrong lane of a group that should be focused on legitimate issues still facing the authors of the world, like censorship.  And the Author’s Guild needs to embrace new technology in all its forms to help further writers and readers, instead of asserting baseless, apocalyptic  claims of a Cylon poetry reading as Armageddon for audio books.

Battle for what is right, and defend what is your’s -- what is the result of your hard work.  Don’t let your honorable crusade be reduced to absurdity.  Don’t let the soldier within you overcome the saint.  Remember what you are fighting for, and do not let the story end this way.