SlashGear Japan
After incurring the wrath of the seemingly ever-furious Authors’ Guild, Amazon have backtracked on the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech functionality by giving publishers, not users, the right to decide whether an ebook is read out loud or not. While still maintaining that the feature is legal, Amazon suggest that rightsholders will “be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”
Amazon are calling the decision one of ”commercial interest” for publishers, and expect most to allow TTS. It’s presumably up to the publishers and authors to negotiate individual rights for each text available.
For the end-user, that means their ability to select text-to-speech (which Amazon are now referring to as an “experimental” feature) will depend on whether the publisher has permitted that aspect of the Kindle 2’s ability. It seems unlikely that Amazon or publishers will be able to charge higher prices for the versions with TTS allowed, as that could be construed as selling an audiobook copy.
Press Release:
Statement from Amazon.com Regarding Kindle 2’s Experimental Text-to-Speech Feature
SEATTLE, Feb 27, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — 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. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.
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 rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.
Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.
One Response to “Amazon cave: Publishers can disable Kindle 2 text-to-speech”
Mark Essel March 3, 2009
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.
Neutral