Why is this happening again? Why does every media industry feel compelled to make the same dumb mistakes? It’s like these companies are waving, Ms. Creative Destruction please come over here and wipe out my business. I just don’t get it.
The latest case in point is the book publishing industry (from Reuters):
The new [Amazon] Kindle can read books aloud, but unlike with audio books, royalties are not paid to authors. [Author's Guild President Roy Blount Jr] argued the technology Amazon uses to turn text into a human voice is quickly improving, and authors need to be “duly vigilant” about this novel means of transmitting their work. The guild, which is studying the issue, has called the Kindle’s speech function a “significant challenge to the publishing industry.” On Friday, Amazon said rights-owners will be allowed to decide — title by title — whether to enable the function.
Go ahead, turn off the audio on the Kindle version of your book. I, along with many other people, will not buy the crippled version of your product. But someone else will care just enough to take a few hours to break the encryption and give the entire book away for free. (Sound familiar?)
I’ll be honest, the text-to-speech feature on the Kindle is the primary reason I purchased the device. I like being able to read a book and then plug it in to continue listening while I am driving in the car. It was a nice advance and has already caused me to purchase more books. That said, I hope that the Author’s Guild and anyone else “studying” the impact of the Kindle’s new feature actually listens to one of their books played over a set of speakers. The quality of the voice is crappy. It’s bearable, and a major improvement, but it’s still crappy. It simply can’t compete with the quality of a professionally recorded audio book.
So, what’s a publisher to do:
First, don’t cripple a poor quality new feature that competes with another one of your product offerings. Take a page from the movie industry’s painfully learned playbook: Some DVDs now include an iPod/AppleTV version of the move along with the DVD for $5 more. Could I buy the DVD and rip it with Handbrake? In most cases, sure. But when it takes me several hours and the results in inconsistent, and often lower quality, I’ll drop the $5 every time.
Second, if you want to make more money and make me a happier user of your product, let me have the relatively crappy computer read audio book with my book purchase for free. But offer to include your kick-ass professional audio book recording as part of the download to the Kindle for $5 more. How often do you sell both a text and audio version of the same book to a user?? I am guessing — approximately — never! Personally, I have done it 3 times in my 36 years on this planet — and I am a far greater than average consumer of both printed and audio books. I would gladly give you more money on nearly every purchase for a better experience. And since you already have the audio book, it would be a no-brainer way to let everyone win.
Book publishers, I like your product entirely too much to see you kill yourselves off. You are at a fork in the road. Please don’t follow the music/movie/newspaper/magazine/software media industries down the wrong path.
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