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

[walkitout]

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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Seems to me that's like folks in the IBM Selectric factory getting computer manufacturers to disable word processing programs. I've listened to a lot of audiobooks. Some are very good and worth every penny. Audible does not license (or sell or whatever the term is) most of the best --- they have their own version and sometimes the narrator is awful. I have a Kindle2 and found the text-to-speech painful to listen to. I won't be. Perhaps it's because I tried it with Krugman, but whatever. I was surprised to find that one can put audiobooks on the Kindle. So if you are willing to accept their speaker quality, it can replace one's mp3 player?

Of course the point is, text-to-speech will only improve over time, so this is just an early warning of the death knell for audiobooks? Some audio books have great production qualities though, so if they can capitalize on that, they won't die completely.

I think you could put audio books on the original kindle, too

[walkitout]

I never did, tho. You don't have to tolerate the speakers; there is
a headphone jack.