Once again big media companies are just making up new rights for themselves. The idea that the properly licensed spoken word version of a published work does not intrinsically include the text is laughable. What's next? Kindle books are infringing on copyright because they reformat the text of the book into a version that fits the user's screen size and preferred font? I mean why not?
And I suppose YouTube is infringing on copyrighted videos when it adds machine-translated CCs, right?
Modern copyright is indistinguishable from rent-seeking.
I don’t understand why publishers are against Audible Captions. That feature makes audiobooks less pirate-able, and it also won’t lead to more pirating of ebooks, since it’s better to share a cracked ePub rather than ill-formatted captions. The only revenue loss I can see is from customers who would otherwise buy both the Kindle and the Audible version, but that must be a small fraction.
They're not against it. They're against licensing it for free, and what permitting media-shifting surprises might do to damage all their licensing agreements.
And I suppose YouTube is infringing on copyrighted videos when it adds machine-translated CCs, right?
Modern copyright is indistinguishable from rent-seeking.
(i.e. They sold the rights to sell the audiobook alone; if audible wants to also include a text version of the book, they want more money).