Audible forced to defend the legal difference between audiobook transcripts and "books"

Today, in the exciting world of niche lawmaking publishing giant turf wars: Amazon-owned Audible is being sued by a number of major publishers over its decision to include caption services with some sections of the audiobook library. And frankly, we love this kind of shit, because that's the kind of thing that at first seems like a good idea about slam-dunk – the transcripts are designed to help struggling readers follow a few words at a time, complete with the ability to pause and get a definition of any word they have trouble with – but then someone goes on to point out that we already have transcripts of audiobooks, and that they are called, eh, "books."

Per THR lawsuit comes with virtually all major publishers in the business – Chronicle Books, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publisher, Macmillan Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, Scholastic and Simon & Schuster – who are pissed off that they were not & # 39; I've even consulted on the decision, claiming that Audible not only distributes the text of copyrighted material without its rights, but that it distributes crappy versions of it, to boot. (The transcripts are generated using machine-based speech-to-text techniques; Audible has reportedly admitted that their technology is fucking up to 6 percent of words.)

[19659004] Audible claims that all this is blown out of proportion, and that Audible Captions is only there to serve as a reading aid, which is why they only show a handful of words at a time. (So ​​yes, you could copy the text to Moby Dick if you were really looking to steal a really boring text in the public, but that would take you a not insignificant part of it extremely limited your life to do so.) That has not prevented the publishers from saying "Well, you still give words that we own, but not in the format you are allowed to distribute them in, so: litigation." the publisher seems to read that if you wanted to read along with an audiobook, you would have damn well bought that text as well (and then sync it through Audible & # 39; s Immersion Reading feature, if you will). [19659004] Christ, we love this nerdy shit.