kindle, text-to-speech, and pushing really hard on the door

You know that movie cliche of the door that someone is trying to break down that suddenly opens on them? Keep that in mind here.

There's been a bunch of pressure from the Author's Guild on Amazon to disable text-to-speech. The blind guys attached the Author's Guild. Some people speculated that parents would have to pay the Author's Guild to have the right to read out loud to the kiddies. Blah, blah, bleeping, blah.

Well, depending on who you read, Amazon has "caved", "retreated" or made "an apparent concession" by working to make it technically possible for text-to-speech to be disabled on a title-by-title basis. Some of the commentary is pointing out that you can get text-to-speech software for a computer and therefore perhaps Apple should be worried next. I'm inclined to think that's a bunch of foolishness, but I'm fully prepared to change my mind the day an App shows up that works with the iPhone book reader app that reads the text out loud.

I particularly like the wording, "an apparent concession", courtesy PC World.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/160415/amazon_modifies_kindle_texttospeech_feature.html

It nicely captures the oh, look, the door is now open phenomenon. I would imagine a fair number of kindle 1 owners who are now also kindle 2 owners are also people who intend to use the kindle 2's text-to-speech feature for their drive time "reading". Given that only a tiny fraction of books are available on audio at all, and an even tinier fraction available via services like one's local library, Overdrive, or for pay at Audible or whatever, drive time book listeners are accustomed to taking what they can get for their commute. Which sort of suggests that over time, there will be data showing that kindle books with text-to-speech allowed sell better than kindle books with text-to-speech disabled -- none of which were selling particularly rapidly in paper form to the people who became their audience with the kindle.

I know Amazon has been chary with the data. But the publishers get paid for every single item sold, so they must know what's selling and what's not in what format, right? It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

that villain, Robin Hood

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022702952.html

Obama campaigned on things like, tax cuts for the middle class, tax increases for people whose yearly income exceeds $200K. Now we see that he's making an effort to make this happen.

Once upon a time, most people did not pay income tax; only those with the highest incomes paid income tax. The very highest tax brackets had what even I would regard as confiscatory marginal rates (something approaching 90%). The effect was expectable. First off, no one paid anyone income that triggered those top rates because after a certain point, giving your employee an additional dollar cost you ten. Second, people engaged in business (you know, that activity that supposedly generates jobs) made sure the money generated by the business went back into the business -- they didn't have a lot of income lying about that wasn't matched by costs. The effect, of course, was to eliminate that group of people who paid the most taxes, and ultimately more people had to pay taxes for the government to have anything to work with to do things like fight a wars, oops! police actions in the jungle. Er, never mind.

So here we see the big fears of the rich members of the right wing. First, redistribution will wipe them out of existence over time, especially if we reinstate a reasonable estate tax. People who come into this new system with a pile can manage the big pile so that it maintains itself without throwing off a lot of income -- this isn't a wealth tax. It's a slow process.

There are some people who don't have a big pile, but who have a non-replaceable skill that "earned" big compensation: think movie stars, top athletes, bestselling authors. There was never a great solution for how to evade the heavy taxes that came with that kind of newly-arrived-at-the-big-time thing, altho in some cases intangibles became a big part of compensation -- the star who gets total control of the picture, for example. Today, big name star television reporters make more than $200K (at least some of them). You can sort of see why these people are unhappy about the budget proposal.

Some of the right wing think tankers figure this won't work because the rich in recent history have been so good at dodging payment:

"partly because those being targeted will find ways to lower their tax bills."

Is this true? Maybe not. Recently, UBS and Switzerland were successfully pressured to disgorge information on a bunch of American tax cheats. Historically, it has been tough to effectively get the Swiss to cough up anything that wasn't drug-related money laundering. I wonder what stick they came up with. But if you can't truss your Swiss banker, you're stuck with outposts in the Caribbean. And we've seen lately how some of that has gone.

I don't have any problem living a nice, middle-class lifestyle. It's really all I ever aspired to. It'll be kinda fun watching the rest of Richistan learn to live within that framework as well.

more from the gadget press

Here's a doozy:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/159926/costjustifying_the_kindle_2.html

"For the sake of argument, let's say I'm an avid reader who buys two paperbacks per month from Amazon."

Too much conflation to be sure of buying and reading and where one buys from, but it is not unreasonable to assume he means his reading for the month are those two paperbacks (not that a seriously avid reader works this way, but bear with me here).

That's not avid.

ETA: He says shortly thereafter:

"That brings my two-paperback-a-month habit (books + shipping) to $447.12 per year." further supporting the hypothesis that this is the extent of his addiction.

_Double Take_, Catherine Coulter

This is N in a series of romantic suspense novels revolving around FBI agents Sherlock and Savich, his computer MAX, and a variety of their Law Enforcement compatriots, friends, family, nanny, etc.

In this entry, Sheriff Dixon Noble whose wife disappeared three years ago is recently involved with Ruth W. They aren't moving too fast, because he doesn't want to claim his wife has abandoned him and it's too soon to declare her dead. Then word in the family is the wife's godfather saw her in San Francisco. Dixon goes out to investigate. She looks very similar, but is not his wife. Meanwhile, a black guy tried to kill the widow of a psychic/necromancer. The attempt is foiled by Special Agent Cheney Stone. Of course these threads will be tied together eventually, altho not until quite late in the novel. Finding out that thirty years ago, some guy was sleeping with his next door neighbor, an older woman who was quite unpleasant, then he killed her and her husband and would have gotten away with it except their son framed him successfully for the murder (which he did actually commit), and then the son used the psychic to stay in touch with Mommie Dearest and then happened to stumble across the sheriff's wife who was a ringer for Mommie Dearest but wouldn't leave husband and kids to hang out with Mommie Dearest's psycho son, so he killed her. But then a guy who knew the sheriff's wife had a sister that looked a lot like her and with work looked even more like her and therefore Mommie Dearest, so they hooked up and then the godfather of the dead woman saw the brother's sister, now wife of psycho son of Mommie Dearest. And this is supposed to explain why psycho son hired the black guy to go on a killing spree including the psychic, the psychic's wife, other psychics in the Bay area, etc.

I have reservations about Coulter -- that's why I get her from the library, and really only when I'm too tired to exert any energy to find something better. After this outing, I may just revert to rereading _The Cove_ whenever I'm tempted to read Coulter. _The Cove_ is awesomely hilarious and wonderful in many ways. The rest of the series ranges from meh to this turd. I mean, it's one thing when all the good guys are LEOs and right wingers who live in rural Virginia. It's a whole other thing when your bad guys wear t-shirts that say I Only Swing Left and say things like I can't believe they said Barbara was too far left. I'll tolerate a lot of right wing foolishness in an otherwise good romance novel, but this isn't an otherwise good romance novel and this is actually going way, way, too far into cartoon-land.

Also, having the only black guy be the crazy assassin is Not Okay. I keep hoping I just read too fast and missed the sympathetic or at least neutral non-white characters. I suppose I should be grateful the good guys didn't attend a Promise Keepers event or a Klan gathering.