Mashraqi on Social, Business & Technical Strategy: Kindle 2 Text to Speech Feature

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[ This is my personal blog so all opinions expressed here are mine. I am a product, scalability, operations and monetization advisor and currently employed as Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. I was a keynote panelist for Scaling Up or Out keynote at MySQL Conference and speak regularly at conferences and user groups. ]

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Kindle 2 Text to Speech Feature - Amazon Giving up?

Even though it was experimental, I liked the Text to Speech feature on my Kindle 2. As I discussed in my Kindle 2 review, Amazon was under pressure from Authors Guild to remove the feature based on alleged copyright violations. Now, it seems that to some extent, Amazon is giving up and allowing the text to speech feature to be turned off unless the book publishers explicitly allow it.

“Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.”Amazon

Seriously, wtf? I really don't see myself buying audio books. I haven't bought one yet, and I don't think I will buy one in the future. However, as Amazon improves the TTS functionality, I am definitely more likely to buy more books. Perhaps, I am biased but it makes me wonder if Authors Guild is trying to become the next RIAA?

Labels: authors-guild, kindle-2