Statement from Amazon.com Regarding Kindle 2′s Experimental Text-to-Speech Feature
The Kindle 2 comes with a nice but intriguing feature called text-to-speech, where reader can stop reading a book and have a built-in synthetic voice read the text out loud. The feature has been controversial subject raised by The Author’s Guild, which challenges the legality of the Kindle 2′s speech system. Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Guild: "They don’t have the right to read a book out loud… That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
Today, Amazon sent out an answer to address the issue with an op-in approach from the rightholders.
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. [Source Amazon]
Yes. And its one of the reasons why I buy non-drm rtf books at Baen books. By the way, Baen also will sell in kindle format and because of their philosophy I can just about gaurantee that Baen won’t disable anything. (Though that alone isn’t enough to make me buy a kindle.)
Baen books supports fair use and they were even kind enough to write me back that their fair use interpretation specifically included a written format to an audio format for personal nonprofit use a couple of years ago. Consequently I buy more books from Baen and their affiliates than I do from any other sourse. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars with them and will continue doing so. No I wont be getting a kindle. Or buying books in a proprietary format. If I oonvert my books to audio or pdf or whatever format I please so there. Baen can have my patronage and my money and the riaa equivalent in the book world can cry “nobody reads anymore.” Or “It must be the pirates fault.” And Baen can still rake in my money. I buy nondrm song from amazon but I wont be buying a kindle so that the riaa book equivalent pukes can disable features of a book I buy on a device I’ve bought.