That's a great question. I don't really know what the Kindle 2 audio experience is like, but there's no way in hell it comes close to the Roy Blount Jr. Experience. I'm guessing (anybody played with one?) that it's on par w/ MacInTalk. Maybe a little smoother, but still lacking the kinds of inflection and stress points that a skilled human reader can impart. (It must be lacking those, because there's nothing to tell it where to put them.) I find it hard to listen to MacInTalk for long stretches because the lack of human cadence and ad hoc inflection makes me have to work harder for meaning. Probably I'd adapt after a while -- but I don't really want to. Why bother when I can read?
On the other hand, it does seem to me that it's a harbinger of things to come. For a few years now I've been expecting the advent of a sort of automated podcast: Blog posts or articles that had been marked-up for automated readers. You could do it with xhtml+css, even -- no need for a new markup language. You'd be able to subscribe to feeds of marked-up text (thus very compact and trivially fast to transfer to your device) that would be interpreted on the fly. It would take some work by patient people to craft ways of describing speech, but the basic work was all done by linguists and phonologists years ago -- it "just" needs to be ported. It wouldn't be a skilled reader's performance (like Peter Riegert did for Yiddish Policeman's Union), and it could well be markedly duller than most people's ordinary speech, even, but it would overcome the key problem of emphasis and cadence in the reading. MacInTalk doesn't know where to place emphasis, and can't change pitch to reflect new characters, and can't do regional or ethnic accents. But a markup-aware MacInTalk could. (Well, maybe not the accents. Not in version 1.) This isn't a hardware issue, by the way: We're talking vector, not bitmap, here, so the memory and processor requirements actually shouldn't be much more than current text-to-speech interpreters. Think of the difference between MIDI and MP3 -- this would be analogous to sending a MIDI file with more instructions in it. Doesn't take any more processing power to change timbre, say, because that's just altering a parameter on something the software is already doing, anyway. So while Kindle 2 probably isn't going to break the audiobook market, its software upgrades will probably start to. But it will be a while before it has an impact on Roy's sales of audiobooks. (I give him credit, though, for giving a crap about people who don't have his built-in advantage.) On 2009-02-25, Alicia Henn <[email protected]> wrote: > > > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html?th&emc=th > > This is an interesting article on the Authors Guild's attempt to get > authors paid audio rights for Kindle's ability to read aloud. Is it > really read aloud if it isn't read by a human? > > Alicia > > > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
