Funding bookstores is seen as a capital expense that provides little financial payback (unless you consider the long term intellectual returns)… so congress gives it little heed.

That’s what I hate about society: priorities are so imbalanced.

Why does a basketball star earn hundred times more than a scientist??? (or a struggling author for that matter?)

As for your blind correspondent being told that allowing text-to-speech is up to the authors, I’d hardly expect a customer service rep at eHarlequin retail to be conversant with the details of the authors’ contracts. Be that as it may, anybody who has ever seen Harlequin’s boilerplate knows that greedy Harlequin snatches up all rights–so the suggestion that there might be some crumbs left for authors to assign elsewhere is ludicrous.

Jumping back to the subject of e-books not taking off for Harlequin, I don’t think it’s particularly instructive to hold up the phenomenal e-tail success of Ellora’s Cave as an example of what Harlequin might achieve if they did it “right.” The Harlequin Way is to operate with a slender profit margin that accommodates the massive promotional push the company puts behind each of its programs. Harlequin is all about volume, and they’re still investigating the e-book market to determine whether they can make that business model will work there. (The relatively small number of titles being offered as e-books suggests Harlequin has not yet made a serious commitment to that market.)

Gosh, is it really 3:42 a.m.? Night-night, Booksquare.

Considering this to be audio rights is simply wrong-headed thinking on so many levels!

Also, there’s no way this can be construed as a piracy issue. Unless you consider publishers trying to overstep their bounds to be a form of piracy.

While I find the 6% royalty pretty egregious (see all posts on this subject…and you can well imagine there are many), I don’t buy into the notion that this is an issue of audio rights. This sounds to me like a serious lack of education about what screen readers are and what they do.

The reader, in this case, is the computer, not another human. The screen reader is a digital voice that reads everything on the monitor out loud. The program I am most familiar with JAWS, but there are others. No extra coding involved, as long as the book is in a standards text-based format (and this includes HTML as the screenreaders are able to parse the code — as long as it’s standards-based). If you’re blind and a capable user of the technology, you control this reader through a series of keyboard commands (possibly voice as well, I’m not sure). The reading speed is much faster than you’d imagine — the first time I “listened” to one my websites, the entire thing was read impossibly fast…I barely caught half of what was said, and I knew what was on the page. The voice that does the reading is, well, as good as electronic voices can be. That is to say, if you’re looking for a dramatic reading of text, try your local theater or buy an audiobook.

I do not buy the audio rights argument. I believe that educated authors would not buy this argument (even though, based on Brenda’s reading of the standard agreement, which jibes with my recollection of said agreement), it would mean a higher royalty. This is the same product as the ebook, but rather than scanning the text with your magic eyes, a machine is scanning and reading it back to you.

Yeah, I think it’s a bogus thing, and I truly believe it’s a lack of understanding, not malice.

As for the e-books not doing well thing, well, I have a lot of theories on that, and most of them won’t make the publisher happy. However, if you do an overlay of HQ traffic versus Ellora’s Cave (an almost-entirely epub), the traffic is very telling. It’s not that the readership doesn’t exist — and I’m not sure it’s a question of price….

This customer ended up being about half-satisfied. I’m not sure that’s good enough in times of declining category sales.

The royalty schedule in Harlequin’s boiler-plate allows for 6% of the cover price for the first 100,000 e-books, which is the same as for print. Audio books, however, command a 50% royalty (yes, that’s fifty) on the cover price–and I’m pretty sure that enabling text-to-speech would be considered audio distribution. Since Harlequin is still very new to the e-book game and has told its authors on several occasions that it’s not yet realizing a good profit in the e-book arena, their reluctance to give authors half of the cover price on each sale is hardly surprising. And I’m no lawyer, but I’m guessing Harlequin would also have to pay the e-book royalties, bringing the author’s payout to 56% of the cover price for each text-to-speech-enabled e-book.

I’m guessing there’s also some extra coding work involved in formatting the books to enable text-to-speech. That would further cut into Harlequin’s profits.

I have over twenty Harlequin e-books in my library, and not one of them has text-to-speech enabled. I don’t care about that, but I am getting tired of checking that dumb little “do you want to open the file, anyway?” box whenever I try to read a book.

For the most part, though, most HQ contracts grant them all rights, including those not yet invented. (No joke.) So only those authors with agents who’ve negotiated retaining the audio rights would be affected by that.

Plus, if the author has retained those rights, and it’s the author who’s being asked if they should or should not enable the read-aloud feature, I think (not a lawyer, here!) they have the right to say yes, go ahead.

Is Harlequin going to continue this way, or will they be making all the books readable to the blind? (i.e. Change to making the read-aloud feature standard.) At the very least, I hope they’re now marking which ones are read-aloudable (yes, I made that word up) and which ones are not. It would be a major pain for that reader to have to engage in trial-and-error book shopping and have to ask for refunds for the ones she can’t read.

As you’ve pointed out, I don’t think many HQ authors are aware of this impact. I’ll be posting a link to your article in a place I know some HQ authors hang out. If they have to make a choice about read-aloudability, then let’s make sure they make a well-informed choice. I’m sure some didn’t consider the implications to blind readers.

The computer, I would imagine, has probably made it easier for the blind to access more information, since the read-aloud feature negates the need to wait for something to be brailled or recorded. I’ll do my part to try to help spread the word.