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Another reason Neil Gaiman is my favorite author

I love me some Neil Gaiman. “The Sandman,” “American Gods,” “Anansi Boys,” too many short stories to name — brilliant shit, all of ‘em. But Gaiman has shown himself, time and again, to be more than simply a good writer. He’s shown himself to be a rather smart and well-reasoned man. Case in point — there’s been some kerfuffle over Amazon’s new Kindle because the new version of their electronic book gadget includes the ability to audibly read books to the owner (the so-called text-to-speech capability). The kerfuffle is that this could be a copyright violation, as the audiobook rights are spearate from print rights, and the Kindle purportedly infringes the audiobook rights.

Gaiman recently posted on his blog about this, noting that his agent was originally of the “this is copyright infringement” mindset. Gaiman’s response:

When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.

Smart, rationale, logical. …Gaiman would be a terrible lawyer.

Posted by Seth on February 17, 2009 | Comments (4)