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Originally Posted by jersysman
I think that since Amazon and Audible are together, I do not think they will be bringing back the text-to-speech. They are going to be pushing full-fledged audiobooks instead as they are now.
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That does not explain why they bought Ivona and are using that for TTS on the Fire tablets. And it is a much better speech engine. The Fire tablets have also taken up some of the slack in accessibility features, so it's not necessary to deliver those in a dedicated device.
I think it was just a matter of saving some manufacturing costs and being able to match or beat the price of the competition. There's a Paperwhite 'teardown' on YouTube and there are these blank regions on the circuit board where an audio chip would have been. None of the competition has audio in their ereaders, and until the Kobo Aura, nobody had more than 2GB.
That also allowed them to reduce the storage that was otherwise needed for audiobook storage.
So I'm not optimistic about a new eink device that adds any hardware features that would push the price back up. Maybe if and when liquavista screens are ready they can charge a little more for a color device.