Amazon’s Audible Sued by Publishers Over New Text Feature
- Penguin, Simon & Schuster seek to block launch of new feature
- Audible seeks to engage ‘first generation of non-readers’
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Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible was sued by publishers who claim a mobile-app feature planned by the audio-book company will violate copyrights by automatically converting narrated works into unauthorized text.
Audible’s licenses for the audio-books don’t include text versions, and the machine-generated transcriptions may contain errors that will harm the quality of the works, publishers including CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House LLC and Scholastic Corp. said in the complaint filed Friday in Manhattan.