Wait Wait… Don’t Sell Me!*

There was an op-ed from Author’s Guild president (and frequent NPR quiz show annoyance) Roy Blount Jr. in today’s NY Times about how authors and publishers should be getting audio-book rights from the Kindle’s text-to-audio feature. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html

I think this is an interesting example of media content producers trying to keep up with a market where money is increasingly more in new distribution models. Is a text-to-audio reader really an audio book? Should it be treated as such? This isn’t too different from the Writer’s strike back in Fall of ’07 over the rights and royalties for web broadcasts, or the complaints of publishers and authors surrounding Google Books, or even the general industry complaints about piracy. 

Some argue that the Author’s Guild’s complaint could apply to a teacher reading a book aloud to a classroom (in the same way downloading a torrent of an album or TV show is like making a cassette copy of a friend’s record or recording the show on your VCR). The editorial deals with this a little but there are still a lot of holes that will need to be filled in as old media and new media continue to collide

*For coming up with this headline, Paula Poundstone won Carl Kassel’s voice on the answering machine of one of our longtime readers!