Amazon's ACX Attempts to Kick Start Audio

Amazon’s Audible arm has launched ACX, Audiobook Creation Exchange. It’s a sort of rights marketplace for audiobooks that connects actors and rights holders and publishers and provides a distribution and marketplace for the finished works on Audible's system. ACX is a kind of one stop shop which handles contracts, tracks and distributes works and pays royalties - a self publishing exchange. Audio rightsholders can post the availability of works whose audiobook rights are unused and producers, publishers, narrators and actors can bid on these.

Rights holders can sell the audio rights for a flat fee or split royalties equally, with royalty rates varying based on sales and whether the rights holder chooses Audible as the audiobook’s exclusive distributor. In addition, there is an additional revenue stream of $25 earned every time a audiobook is one of the first three titles purchased by an AudibleListener member.

Random House, Harper, Wiley and Pearson Education, as well as Writers House are early participants. With the vast majority of books audio rights sitting locked away and not being exercised, it begs the question of how big the market is and whether there is a sufficient pent up latent demand for audio books or whether they remain relatively niche market? The biggest issue has always been production and with it the associated cost. If Audible are going to facilitate making production easier and by means of an exchange driving costs down that may help, but what once was thought to be an early digital opportunity is still searching to make it.

iPad: Text 2 Speech Again?

Remember when the Kindle DX appeared and the Authors Guild jumped on their text to speech facility? The claim was that they believed the reading was a “derivative work” for which Authors and Publishers should be paid royalties. Amazon conveniently stepped side-wards and left it to authors and publishers to decide what could and couldn’t be heard.

Now in the iPad world Apple has stated that the iPad will read all ePub format eBooks outloud to you. Apple state that “iBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page.” The synthesised reading experience will not be as good as hearing an actor deliver the words, but it will offer it and states it with no caveats on the author or publisher agreement.

Will the Guild will once again stand resolute, or will it bow to the Apple dazzle? If Apple is given a free run, will Amazon return and claim that what is good for Apple is good enough for Amazon? We would expect all the tablet devices to offer text to speech and for that matter most digital devices to have it as a standard in the near future. But does money have to be paid even if the facility is never used just because its there? If someone trys it and on hearing it rejects it, is money still due? If the rendering is dynamic is that creating a new rendition or form or merely using the same one and therefore not subject to royalty. Will the new feature simply create great opportunities for the visually impaired that should not be overlooked?

As we wrote before it will be some time before text to speech can be anywhere near the quality of today’s actor delivered audio book, but does opposing it today make sense on what is substandard audio, or should the debate be had when quality is such that it makes it relevant?