Why is the Author's Guild selling Amazon's Kindles?

When I first heard of it, I didn't give much second thought to Kindle 2's text-to-speech feature - I can read most text an order of magnitude faster than human speech, so listening to a voice when I can read something is more of an anti-feature. Then, the Author's Guild decided to "cause a stir", and things got a lot more interesting.

As far as I can tell, the AG isn't actually filing a lawsuit. Legally, the case is extremely weak (at best), and surely Amazon explored all legal implications before launching the feature. That means both Amazon's and the AG's lawyers have decided there is no case. Why, then, does Roy Blount, the president of the Author's Guild, commence writing an op-ed in the New York Times about it? This part is a clue:

You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter" or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.)

Let me get this straight - Roy is complaining that Amazon is creating derivative works without paying royalties, eating into his constituents' "billion-dollar market", but also praising the very feature that he claims his industry is competing with? I can see a tenuous quasi-legal link - that one might argue the TTS voice quality is simply too awful to be considered a derivative work. But that's rhetoric, not a real legal argument.

Next, I checked the Author's Guild website, where the top story is "Kindle 2 Audio: How Does It Sound?". Can you guess which part of the op-ed it expound on?

As Roy Blount says in an op-ed in today's New York Times, Kindle 2's TTS isn't Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter," but it's listenable. There's no need to take our word for it; have a listen to the sample below.

Then it hit me - the top story from the Author's Guild is a sales pitch for the Kindle 2.

Paul Graham wrote about how PR agencies plant advertisements disguised as news. It seems entities like the Author's Guild have started playing that role, also. I can't imagine Amazon is paying AG as they would a PR agency, so what's in it for them?

Marxist Engineering

Kiril writes well about creating tech assets for business. So well, that I think his point generalizes even farther he thinks.

Coding is inherently about abstraction - building big things with lots of complexity hidden underneath layer and layer of metaphor. More advanced languages provide a coder with better tools to create these abstractions, these metaphors. In this context, "better" means many things, most important among them being domain, strength, and transparency (TODO: link, or expound).

As the languages we use become more powerful, our ability to create metaphors which span vast domains increases, also. Consider jQuery - this small JavaScript library is probably the most misunderstood and underrated piece of software currently written. It takes an ugly, pain-in-the-ass DOM API, with all of its browser incompatibilities, non-standard event models, all that stuff, and wraps it up into the form:

$(subject).verb(object)

.verb(adjective)...

That brought a tear to my eye the first time I saw it. Still does. JavaScript could always do this, but the JS DOM API wasn't written this way. Why not? Because it was written by people (or maybe for people) who were used to weaker metaphors (I'll spare you the getElementByFoo example).

This is an important point - languages can change relatively quickly, it's the programmers' habits which are the bottleneck to tech progress. It's the corporate "senior enterprise Java certified developers" so devoted to the technology and patterns they once invested all of their time into who are the bottleneck. It's the IDE's that are targeted for them to use, ditto for the source code version control, and the Microsoft SQL servers their bosses pay exuberant money for.

But the future is democratic. The future is in what Kiril calls "reusable code assets", open to the proliteriat for free use, and infinite reuse. Languages are already there, and it's only a matter of time before coders catch up. With them catch up the IDE's will, as will source repositories. The future is in sharing, searching, and mixing smaller and smaller "code assets". The limit is probably small enough to surprise even the most idealistic of us.