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Amazon agrees to cripple Kindle 2
In a victory for neo-Luddites the Author's Guild, Amazon has announced its intention to disable the speech to text function its new Kindle 2 ebook reader. Amazon announced its intention to selectively disable the device following criticism from the Author's Guild President Roy Blount Jnr. that the Kindle 2 would undermine the billion dollar a year audiobook market.
In a statement released to the press, Amazon argued that the text-to-speech feature was legal, but said that it would give authors the right to decide whether or not to disable the feature for their books:
'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... nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat... Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rights holders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title.'
It's unclear if the Author's Guild plans to now campaign to receive royalties from all other text-to-speech programs, but its hollow victory is sure to be received poorly by the visually impaired and any other consumers who are forking out around $350 bucks for their new Kindle and want to actually use the legal functionality that it has been designed with.
Hopefully Amazon will flag up which cheapskate publishers have disabled the text to speech functionality of their books very clearly, so that Kindle users can be sure to vote with their wallets and boycott those responsible for this shameful decision.
[Via the New York Times]
Comments
24
Subscribe to commentsArc|AngelMar 1st 2009 8:38PM
Good grief. Do they really think the awful speech engine in this will hinder audio books that much? So if this is a violation of copyright what about Kurzweil which is as close to real human as you get from a text-2-speech program that is used by thousands upon thousands of students with reading disabilities?
mike k.Mar 1st 2009 10:36PM
I give this 20 mins from launch until this is hacked back on.
Mark EsselMar 3rd 2009 1:36PM
While it’s a lovely device due to the readability, storage, size, and efficiency. The Kindle 2 is still subject to the whim of the Author’s Guild it seems, and therefore any information that flows through the device will be ruled by a consortium of folks with an outdated view on media ownership and control.
Publishers will control the text-to-speech feature.
This type of feature change after the release of a product is frightening or at the very least damaging to Amazon’s market position for it’s Kindle Books.
It amazes me that we are finding new ways to value information for it’s pertinence, quality, and timeliness on the internet but our vast riches of older written information must suffer in it’s availability due to old thinking.
I suggest a simple solution, one media rule that rewards any media authors based on the popularity of their works as well as sociably redeeming qualities. The capitol can be generated via ads to free users, or by subscriptions to those that prefer to avoid ads.
goron40Mar 30th 2009 4:23PM
"... disable the speech to text function its new Kindle 2..."
Everywhere else in the article it says "text to speech"
Which is it?