There’s good news and bad news.\u00a0 The good news is that the new Vatta book has hit 50 pages, and though it’s going slowly, it’s still alive so far.\u00a0 Ky and Rafe and Stella sound like themselves, and the twins are a hoot.<\/p>\n
The bad news is that Audible has gone bananas, peanuts, and crazy-cake with a new idea that’s a BAD idea for writers and publishers.\u00a0 I have no problem with books being presented in an audio format as well as a print format.\u00a0\u00a0 But those are two separate formats, and book contracts specify who gets which chunk.\u00a0 Books, audiobooks, and movies (audio-visual) are *different things*.\u00a0\u00a0 A book you read to yourself is not the same as a book you hear read without looking at the text, is not the same as a movie you watch on a screen (any size screen) with actors playing the parts and so on.\u00a0 That’s why the rights are sold separately: print rights to print publishers, audio rights to audio publishers, and movie rights to movie companies.<\/p>\n
Why this matters right now.\u00a0 Audible (and its parent Amazon) have decided that it would be nifty-cool-great to add *captions* to its audiobooks so people could read along if they wanted to.\u00a0\u00a0 Several lines of text would display at a time, as the book was read, moving ahead with the voice actor’s reading.\u00a0 They rolled out this program in July (I was busy in July; didn’t notice.\u00a0 Ditto August.)\u00a0\u00a0 There are several problems.<\/p>\n
On the minor<\/em> side, audiobooks are not all unabridged texts–some do not all contain all the words in the book<\/em>.\u00a0 Thus the “text” of the captions might be different from the books, and create another text version, which–in publishing–means they would need a separate contract.\u00a0 Which they don’t have.<\/p>\n On the major<\/strong> side, even if the audiobook contained every single word in the original…someone else already has the publishing rights to that format<\/strong>.\u00a0 And that “someone else” will be peeved to find that its rights have been infringed…Penguin Random House, for instance, or Baen Books, would not be happy to find that Audible is putting out, essentially, a print edition without its permission.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is why several major publishers have filed lawsuits against Audible’s addition of visible text to its sound recordings.\u00a0 And if their suits lose, and Audible puts the text out there…these publishers might even sue me, for allowing Audible to do so, as a breach of my contract with them (and a way to get some money back) even though it’s also Audible’s breach of a contract with me…since their contract permits them to make, distribute, and sell *only audio format.*<\/p>\n However, even if these lawsuits are won by the publishers, and Audible is enjoined from treating books from those publishers that way…what about the writers who have reverted their books from publishers, or are self-publishing, but have audio contracts with Audible?\u00a0 As was just explained to me by my agent, if I won a lawsuit against, say, Wal-Mart for doing something that damaged me, it would not stop Wal-Mart from doing the same thing to someone else.\u00a0 Audible, which is being less than cooperative about this rights-grab they’re into, intends to do it willy nilly.\u00a0\u00a0 (And it is a rights-grab.\u00a0 There’s nothing in my contracts with Audible that gives them the right to reproduce visible text…only sound files, not visual files.)\u00a0\u00a0 At present I have two books in that dangerous position.\u00a0 Remnant Population<\/strong>‘s Audible contract is due for renewal fairly soon.\u00a0 I will not be renewing that, even though it means no audiobook will be available until we find another audio publisher.\u00a0 It’s the only power I have, to refuse to deal with them. The other’s Audible contract has a few more years to run.\u00a0 And I do have books with my publishers that will be affected, depending on how the publishers’ lawsuits come out.<\/p>\n So tired of the tech sector deciding they’re so clever with this new! shiny! they’ve invented that we must all accept it and cheer for it.\u00a0 Bah, Humbug.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s good news and bad news.\u00a0 The good news is that the new Vatta book has hit 50 pages, and though it’s going slowly, it’s still alive so far.\u00a0 Ky and Rafe and Stella sound like themselves, and the twins are a hoot. The bad news is that Audible has gone bananas, peanuts, and crazy-cake Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,5],"tags":[7,21],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-progress","category-the-writing-life","category-vatta","tag-the-writing-life","tag-vatta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":495,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions\/495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}