Seven major book publishers are suing Audible over a new captions feature that transcribes and displays the text of narrated performances.
The Association of American Publishers (AAP), on behalf of its member companies, has filed a complaint asking the U.S. District Court to squelch Audible’s machine-generated function.
The suit, filed on Friday in New York, claims “willful copyright infringement,” and highlights Audible’s alleged efforts to “take for itself cross-format features” without authorization from, compensation to, or quality control by intellectual property owners.
In this case, that includes Chronicle Books, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster.
“We are extremely disappointed by Audible’s deliberate disregard of authors, publishers, and copyright law,” AAP President and CEO Maria Pallante said in a statement.
Introduced in late July, Audible Captions aims to enhance the literary experience by allowing listeners to follow along with “a few lines of text.”
“We developed this technology because we believe our culture, particularly in under-resourced environments, is at risk of losing a significant portion of the next generation of book readers,” Audible CEO Don Katz wrote in a summer announcement.
A sentiment with which I’m sure the AAP agrees.
It’s the underhanded way Audible approached the feature that publishers are not on board with.
“In what can only be described as an effort to seek commercial advantage from literary works that it did not create and does not own, Audible is willfully pushing a product that is unauthorized, interferes and competes with established markets, and is vulnerable to grammatical and spelling inaccuracies,” according to Pallante.
“It is a disservice to everyone affected, including readers,” she said.
Audible, of course, disagrees with the claims of copyright violation.
“We are surprised and disappointed by this action and any implication that we have not been speaking and working with publishers about this feature, which has not yet launched,” the firm wrote in response.
“Captions was developed because we, like so many leading educators and parents, want to help kids who are not reading engage more through listening,” it continued. “It is not and was never intended to be a book.”
Audible already provides simultaneous text and audio via “Immersion Reading” (read along with the ebook as you listen to the audiobook)—which the AAP said operates lawfully, and without errors.
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