The Murverse Mothership

Who’s in the mood for a really nice ditch?

So here’s a thing; Audible have just announced Audible Captions. Audible Captions is designed as a study aid for students listening to audio books. Basically, as the book is read, you can watch the screen and the text will appear in sync with the reading. You can pause it, highlight it, the whole bit. It is, in the platonic ideal of the concept, a really very good idea. A means of combining listening and Reading in a way that’s going to make learning easier for a lot of people. Plus it’s great for the visually impaired. Like I say, in the most platonic, unconnected to the real world way possible it’s a good idea. Look everyone, Amazon helped for once! Instead of sinking three years into what looks suspiciously like making Homer Simpson’s drawn from memory LEM design a reality that no one but the sociopathic billionaires who want to flee the world they’ve killed wants!

 

 

But when you look at this from the point of view of the publishing industry, things get darker. Let’s start with the functionality, stripped of all ethical concerns. Captions allows readers to interact with the text of the audio book they’re listening to, nothing less, nothing more. That’s a great idea and it’s also one which, at least in theory, Amazon already have. Whispersync, aside from sounding a little like the mode Airwolf used to use to sneak into bits of the Middle East that looked a lot like California, is designed to sync books and audio books. You buy a book and have to switch to the audio book? If the book is WhisperSync enabled then the audio book will automatically pick up where you left the prose. It’s a great idea, and requires you to buy the book twice because you’re doing so in two different formats. But it‘s also not especially intuitive. The two copies exist as solo entitles because, well, that’s what they are. If you buy a book, then you’ve bought a book. If you buy an audio book, you’ve bought an audio book. Same city, sure, but different sides of the river. And, more importantly, different entities. And more importantly still? The authors get paid twice, as well they should.

Captions changes that. The text is right there on the screen as you listen, the prose and audio unfolding together and wrapped around one another. It’s a different entity, an audio book you annotate, a book you listen to. Or at least that seems to be the plan. The reality is that this isn’t a new entity, this is two versions of the same thing, smushed together. This is Ron Silver at the end of TimeCop, an ugly screaming legal mess mitigated only by how happy I am to FINALLY BE ABLE TO MAKE THAT REFERENCE.

Anyway, Novelist Erin Bowman nails it here:

“Unless Audible has purchased print rights for the title or the reader has purchased the book in print form (physical or ebook) and unlocked captions’ with a code or something, I’m not sure how this is legal,” novelist Erin Bowman tweeted.”

While friend of the DD Network and actual agent of Matt, Dongwon Song makes the point that the conflict here is that Audible are acting as both publisher and retailer.

“If Audible is producing a book as a sublicense from a publisher,” he says “then they only have rights to the audio, or they have the right to create and sell an audio recording of the text, and that’s all the rights that they’re given: they’re not given any text rights, they’re not given any electronic rights, they’re just given the right to distribute an audio edition.”

Both are absolutely right. What Amazon seem to be doing here is packaging two versions of the text as one, calling it a new thing that will help and dancing off singing You’re Welcome before we realize they’ve stolen the boat. To be explicit; if the author is not paid for both the audio book adaptation of their work and the ebook which Captions projects, a paragraph at a time on screen?  Then that’s a  breach of contract at worst and expectation at best, It may not be theft but it sure owns a few stripey jumpers and sacks marked SWAG. 

Especially as no one seems to actually know if Amazon have got the legal rights to do this, which is a pretty important part of the deal. it’s interesting then that when the Verge reached out to Audible about these concerns they were told:

‘Texts that can be transcribed at a sufficiently high confidence rate’ would be the ones to get the feature.’

Which, I guess, means textbooks? But that doesn’t answer the legal issue, so much as put all the fire in one cupboard for the time being. That same Verge piece has Penguin Random House saying:

‘We have reached out to Audible to express our strong copyright concerns with their recently announced Captions program, which is not authorized by our business terms.’

Simon & Schuster have gone further and explicitly said they want none of their books in the program. Macmillan said they were ‘looking into it’. Even the Authors Guild have spoken out against it. Audible’s response? It:

‘does not agree with that interpretation.’

I’m reminded of the old Blackadder II episode and the captain who insists opinion is divided on whether you need a crew. Everyone else says you do, he says you don’t. Only this time the captain is a global mega corporation that could end world poverty over night but doesn’t want to because having money is HARD you guys!

Now there is a case for welcoming innovation here and as that Verge piece details there are features that stop Captions functionality from being 100% ebook. Plus, we survive when we evolve and the project as presented certainly seems to be built with good intentions. I  would have put good use to it during my time studying and you have to applaud Amazon for wanting to do something that helps students get more from their text.

But there’s also a perceptual issue here, one that cuts both ways. On the other, there’s Amazon, the ecosystem that walks like Jeff Bezos’ inferiority complex. There is NO way to sell them as the underdog here but you could, JUST barely look at their stance as an attempted piece of enlightened altruism. On some level, it is but to believe they didn’t anticipate legal issues with this is an impossible ask. This is the world’s largest velociraptor testing the fences. looking for weaknesses. Remembering.

Then there’s the ‘Big Publishing’ myth which says John Macmillan, Heinrich Gollancz, Simon Schuster and the rest meet once a year at Mount Fireball to decide which authors get a slice of the pie and to hunt poor people for sport. Or, perhaps, to have poor people hunted for sport by their staff. Whichevs.

That idea, the TradPub bloc, is a beloved straw man of a lot of the indie publishing scene and it’s dull, lazy and inaccurate. I’m always up for fighting The Man (Unless it’s this The Man of course, #teambecky) but to view Big Publishing as Big, especially when put beside Amazon, is frankly hilarious. Genre fiction is a cottage. Fiction is a village. Amazon is an ecosystem. Is there resistance to the new? I don’t know let me just ask my fifteen years as a fiction podcaster and three years of podcasting being noticed as a Thing. Is it as bad or unwarranted as it’s painted? Sometimes. In this instance, not at all. Because authors  deserve to be paid for their work, in whatever format it comes in and what Amazon are proposing here is a workaround that will take money from them even as it helps other people. Whether it’s intentional or not is irrelevant. The fact it’s being viewed this way? Tells you everything about how undervalued we are in every conceivable marketplace. When that changes, everything changes. Captions, regardless of what it does, will not make that change a good, or easy one if it goes through.

And that’s the ditch I’m digging this month.