So if you haven’t heard of Kindle, it’s the e-Book reader/marketplace that Amazon.com has set up. Right now they’re focusing on Kindle 2, the newfangled revamped version, which includes a text-to-speech function… As in, you turn the feature on, and you’ll hear your computer reading the book to you in a scary robot voice.

…Hm. You know, I’ve got nothing against books on tape, and I’ve got nothing against Doctor Stephen Hawkings, but I’m not sure I’m so hot on the idea of books on tape as read by Doctor Stephen Hawkings… Unless the book in question happens to be Hawking’s own A Brief History Of Time .

After some complaints, Amazon has decided that they’re going to offer authors and publishers the right to decide whether or not to allow for the text-to-speech function on their particular book, so that “rightsholders can decide on a title-by-title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for a particular title”.

The complaints were that this would somehow violate audio rights over the book… but let me tell you, nobody’s sitting around going “Why would I spring for the audio book as read by Sir Anthony Hopkins? I’ve got a scary computer voice shouting the story at my ears in a booming monotone, and for free!”

If you really want to hear STORY-BOT 9000 read Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road into your eardrums, you can always download a separate text-to-speech program and copy and paste a chapter at a time.

If you ask me, the whole story is kind of silly. It’s silly to think someone wants a book read to them by their computer, and it’s silly that anyone would care if this or that reader actually DOES want to do just that.

Incidentally, the complaints came not from authors, but from the “Author’s Guild”. The Authors Guild is basically a group of legal experts who charge you membership dues to look at publishing contracts for you, so… all this fuss reminds me of a good lawyer joke, what’s the difference between a “shame” and “a crying shame”?

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