The nuances of licensing ... On Feb 26, 2:10 am, Dave Henn <[email protected]> wrote: > OK, what if it were a play? You write a script. Someone buys a copy, feeds > it into their computer, and programs very convincing robots/androids to > perform the play in a theater down the street from the place where your play > is being performed by humans at half the price per ticket with marketing > touting the performance as nearly as the human one because of new programs > the robots are running. Oh, and the robot performance is just an extra > feature - the "main attraction" is the text of your play on display.
Is the robot theater a "general purpose play reader" wherein the text of _any_ play could be fed into it and a performance almost as good as a human performance would come out? Or is it a theater where the play must be modified from a pure text-based form -- adding direction, lighting, scenery, etc? Regardless, your analogy is flawed in another way: it is a performance where people _go to_ the theater -- an illegal situation given the single-user license for a printed play. The Kindle approach is to sell everyone a theater with robots which can perform any play which they then have to buy separately. What if it were a box with a Furby and a talking Barbie and you could feed any script into it and it would read the play, alternating between the two robots to simulate dialog? It's essentially a specialized audio reader -- much more similar to the Kindle. As an individual, it's already within my hobbyist grasp to create my own Kindle with text books: I could cut the spine off, feed it into my scanner, use optical character recognition (OCR) to convert it to text, then feed it through a fancy text-to-speech algorithm and listen to it on my iPod. As long as such a path exists and is legal, then I can't see how the Kindle changes that. I think your argument is that audio books and printed books create separate revenue opportunities to the author. However, if you dig down to the consumer, are there really that many people who buy a printed book then also buy the audio book? If they only buy one or the other, then you might entice _more_ consumers if you offer them both at once -- even though they will likely use only one version _or_ the other most of the time. To charge them for an audio book they won't use, or to charge them for a printed book they don't plan to use will only infuriate them. ---Jason Olshefsky --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
