I wonder if the publishers will also be mad about Android Q's upcoming feature which can transcribe any audio on your phone: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18528447/google-android-q-...
Kindles actually used to have headphones jacks and a feature to automatically transcribe books that you owned into auto-generated speech.
It was a fantastic accessibility feature, but the publishers complained, and the feature and the hardware supporting it were both removed. Although like people are saying, I guess the headphone jack also probably wasn't a very popular feature.
Headphone jack was probably removed to save money... I think the high end kindles support Bluetooth.
Translation: It's optional for the publishers to enable DRM restricting it or not.
If I buy a paperback book, there is nothing stopping me from building a machine I can insert the book into that scans the page, OCRs it to text, and then converts the text to audio.
DRM'd ebooks are a travesty, which is why I immediately remove all DRM as soon as I buy one so that I have full freedom to do whatever I want with it.
Nothing except the extreme hassle of doing so.
Digital is different, because it’s so much easier and cheaper to perform such transformative operations.
eBooks are extremely restrictive by comparison. They are so locked down that you can't do any of the above things I mentioned. You only have one basic freedom: to read it with approved software on an approved device with the publisher in complete control.
* Manufacturers of reading glasses don't require a license to transform works a user consumes into a format more accessible to them
* A built-in magnifier app does not require a license to transform works a user consumes into a format more accessible to them
* A built-in audio transcriber - and this seems to be the sticking point somehow? - should not require a license to transform works a user consumes into a format more accessible to them
A lot of people are getting caught up on this whole "whether it creates a derivative work" thing. And my point is: yes it does, of course it does, any method of consumption effectively does, and these should be explicitly allowed in the name of doing what's right for users and accessibility.
Whether it's built in to the app or built in to the OS, the same transformation is happening. And it's such an essential freedom to be able to consume media that you purchased in an accessible form that I could really give a rat's ass if the publisher thinks that you're only "licensed" to consume that media when it's emitted as sound waves from their approved audio source.
Those publishers probably don't have much leverage against third parties who make tools for personal use. Making copies for personal use is legal, as is manufacturing devices which can make copies. I figure the Android functionality is probably legal given this case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....