Even though Amazon agreed to allow authors and publishers the right to decide whether Kindle e-books can be read aloud, here are couple more (belated) links about Kindle 2 reading e-books via text-to-speech synthesizer.
LA Times, Amazon Kindle 2 makes authors’ e-Books more compelling, “Innovators such as Amazon are and should be free to create devices that help consumers exploit all of the rights they obtain when they purchase books and other copyrighted material. And by the way, Authors Guild: Amazon sells e-books. The Kindle makes those products more appealing to consumers, which makes them more valuable to authors and publishers. If authors hope to compete in the digital era, they need the e-book market to succeed. Stripping features from the Kindle 2 won’t help.”
Derek Bambauer, Info/Law, Kindle Owners of the World, Unite!: “Roy Blount Jr., writer and president of the Author’s Guild, has a jeremiad in the New York Times about Amazon’s Kindle, and its ability to read books aloud. Blount thinks that is a violation of authors’ rights. After giving some thought to his argument, I can only conclude that Blount should stick to sports, because he’s pretty confused about copyright.”
Ben Sheffner, Copyrights & Campaigns, Amazon compromises on Kindle 2’s ‘read-to-me’ feature; who can blame them?: “Remember: Amazon can only offer books via Kindle because it has contracts with authors and/or publishers that permit it to reproduce, display, and distribute their books in digital form. I haven’t seen such contracts, but I’m confident they contain myriad deal points: money, term of license, and exquisite detail about what Amazon is actually permitted to do with the digital copies.”
On Late Night with Jimmy Falllon, Kindle 2 reads the classics:
Which is a similar, but opposite joke, as Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s James Lipton reads the lyrics to Kevin Federline’s Popozao.
