Audible sued over plans for captioning feature

New York — Some of the country’s top publishers are suing Audible, citing copyright infringement as they ask a federal judge to enjoin the audiobook producer-distributor’s planned use of captions for an education-driven program.

The so-called “Big Five” of publishing — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishers and Macmillan Publishers — are among the plaintiffs in the suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The legal action comes in response to “Audible Captions,” which Audible announced in July and indicated would be formally launched as students return this fall, with titles including “Catch-22,” ‘’The Hunger Games” and “The Hate U Give.”

“Audible Captions takes publishers’ proprietary audiobooks, converts the narration into unauthorized text, and distributes the entire text of these ‘new’ digital books to Audible’s customers,” the lawsuit reads. “Audible’s actions — taking copyrighted works and repurposing them for its own benefit without permission — are the kind of quintessential infringement that the Copyright Act directly forbids.”

Other publishers suing are Scholastic and Chronicle Books.

Audible, which is owned by Amazon.com, said in a statement that it was disappointed by the lawsuit and “any implication that we have not been speaking and working with publishers about this feature, which has not yet launched.”

The company said the captions are intended to help children who are not reading be able to engage with books through listening. “This feature would allow such listeners to follow along with a few lines of machine-generated text as they listen to the audio performance,” the statement said.