Kindle: Text-to-speech disabling has arrived

[tompe]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

I'm not sure, when I ran mobi2mobi the value came back as a smiley character.

This is a new flag, and in general the ebooks that allow TTS don't even have an EXTH record 404. So a missing 404 means TTS is allowed. There may also be a value for the 404 record that allows TTS, but someone with a Kindle 2 would have to experiment (or find an AZW ebook which allows TTS but with a 404 flag).

OK, good to know it is a string. I updated mobi2mobi so it knows that (default is string so really no change in functionality).

Is it confirmed that removing entry 404 will allow TTS?

[sirbruce]

Well, earlier posts in this thread which answered that question were deleted. Infer what you will...

[tompe]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Well, earlier posts in this thread which answered that question were deleted. Infer what you will...

OK. I think it is a bad decision to remove information if you do not have to. Why guess what is allowed? in this case the DRM seems to be trivial so then it is not covered by the laws.

[stevenmoy]

The lion is sleeping. I will not recommend any children to go in front of the sleeping lion and make faces at the lion.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by stevenmoy

The lion is sleeping. I will not recommend any children to go in front of the sleeping lion and make faces at the lion.

Do you mean the author guild and the publishers? Amazon is probably very happy if people can use the TTS facility on all books.

[sirbruce]

:facepalm:

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by tompe

OK, good to know it is a string. I updated mobi2mobi so it knows that (default is string so really no change in functionality).

Is it confirmed that removing entry 404 will allow TTS?

So why not add in entry 404 and then have someone with a K2 see if TTS is disabled.

[wallcraft]

Free samples also seem to have TTS disabled, for example here is the result of mobi2mobi on a sample of American Lion by Jon Meacham:

EXTH doctype: EXTH
EXTH length: 436
EXTH n_items: 22
EXTH item: 106 - PublishingDate - 4 - 2008
EXTH item: 104 - ISBN - 13 - 9781588368225
EXTH item: 101 - Publisher - 12 - Random House
EXTH item: 109 - Rights - 31 - Copyright ⌐ 2008 by Jon Meacham
EXTH item: 300 - 300 - 58 - 0x3000000000000008002000000000000000f4edecbe1e01a
91e81e74093409440994098409c409d40a6
EXTH item: 204 - 204 - 4 - 0x0001
EXTH item: 205 - 205 - 4 - 0x0006
EXTH item: 206 - 206 - 4 - 0x0002
EXTH item: 207 - 207 - 4 - 0x0002b
EXTH item: 201 - CoverOffset - 4 - 0x0004
EXTH item: 203 - hasFakeCover - 4 - 0x0000
EXTH item: 202 - ThumbOffset - 4 - 0x0005
EXTH item: 1 - drm_server_id - 9 - EBOOKBASE
EXTH item: 2 - drm_commerce_id - 11 - AMAZON_1110
EXTH item: 100 - Author - 12 - Meacham, Jon
EXTH item: 113 - ASIN - 10 - B001FA0JSM
EXTH item: 115 - Sample - 4 - 0x0001
EXTH item: 401 - ClippingLimit - 1 - 0x0
EXTH item: 403 - 403 - 1 - 0x0
EXTH item: 503 - UpdatedTitle - 48 - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
EXTH item: 404 - 404 - 1 - ☺
EXTH item: 501 - CDEContentType - 4 - EBSP

So far, all ebooks without EXTH 404 allow TTS and all ebooks with 404 disallow TTS. Is this still the case with samples?

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Has anyone stripped the DRM from a TTS disabled AZW and then tried it to find out if the TTS works?

Stripping the DRM does not change the EXTH entries, which seem to control TTS. However, if you add a DRM-free MOBI to Calibre, update its metadata, and then export the MOBI almost all its EXTH records will be removed.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It is true that Amazon doesn't make the decision about TTS, but that is not to say they are neutral about it: they own Audible, and they also sell audiobooks (CDs) on Amazon. So depending on whether it has any effect on their overall sales, they may encourage publishers in one way or the other.

I'm pretty sure that if they thought it would cost them audiobook sales, they wouldn't have developed the feature in the first place. Then they wouldn't need to bother removing it.

[zadriel]

So has anyone verified exactly how to reinstate the TTS functionality for a disabled book? PM me if necessary, if you have a tutorial as it were, I'll find a site and publish the info so it can be hosted overseas if necessary. Thx

[elmoglick]

Here's an interesting twist. I just downloaded about 7 books from my Kindle's Archive that are currently listed as having TTS disabled, which I had purchased prior to the implementation of the TTS prohibition, and have found that all them still work just fine with the TTS feature.

Can someone else replicate this? Although I still fault Amazon for caving to the Writers Guild, the apparent fact that books purchased when TTS was enabled will remain TTS-enabled does say something positive about Amazon's attention to detail and may demonstrate an effort to be as helpful to their customers as legally possible.

I've been tagging all TTS-disabled books as "no-tts" and "tts boycott". Please consider doing the same (along with sending a nastygram to the ignorant publishers).

El

[Alisa]

One of the problems with tagging stuff like that is that if they listen to you and change it, the tag will remain. People were tagging stuff with the 9.99 boycott and the tags were still there after the book had been marked down. It sometimes takes a few days after release for Amazon to catch them and mark them down. I doubt it had jack all to do with the tags since that seemed to be happening long before the boycott, but still the conditions were met and the tags remained. People have to vote them off.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Free samples also seem to have TTS disabled, for example here is the result of mobi2mobi on a sample of American Lion by Jon Meacham: So far, all ebooks without EXTH 404 allow TTS and all ebooks with 404 disallow TTS. Is this still the case with samples?

Thanks for the printout. It seems to be a one byte flag so I will fix mobi2mobi so that it prints it as that instead.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by elmoglick

Can someone else replicate this? Although I still fault Amazon for caving to the Writers Guild,

I think they caved to the publishers. The authors guild was very vocal but they got a lot of complaints from the publishers also and from what i remember of Amazon's statement about this it seemed that it was the publishers' opinions they cared about.