Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
Yes, but... There are *many* books with no official audio books and there are those of us who do use the TTS feature. It is really nice that my Fire can switch back and forth between ebook and audio, but it's really nice to have TTS when it's available.
And it would be nice if Amazon *really* used Ivona. I played around with it on an android tablet I had for a while and I really preferred quality of the TTS as compared to the default Fire.
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The KT TTS is pretty nice and yes, the Ivona TTS is even better.
But, as we keep coming back to in this thread, Kindles are all about lowest-common denominator usage patterns. So, while it would be really nice to see Amazon go all out and do a Kindle Pro high-feature eink reader, I doubt we'll see it. It's not impossible, but I don't think they see a big enough market for it because it runs counter to their normal economies of scale.
Kindle prices are built around the virtuous circle of high volume sales (a lot like pbooks, actually): high volume sales leads to lower build costs which leads to lower sale prices which leads to more sales and more efficiencies and lower costs and round and round until they hit a point of diminishing returns where going lower doesn't necessarily bring in more sales, just lower (zero?) profit.
Now, try to cram in more hardware: audio, higher resolution, more memory...
Price goes up, well into tablet territory. Volume goes down because most buyers really are happy with the basic model and the silent PW. Lower volume means lower units to spread fixed (R&D and design, staff and overhead) costs over as well as lower component buys with less leverage and higher unit costs. This drives the build cost higher, the projected list price higher, and expected sales lower. Pretty soon what looked like a million-selling $129 PW with $20-30 worth of extra components has turned into a $200 Kindle that might not sell the 100k units needed to break even.
The same non-linear economics that drove down Kindle prices by half in two years (2010-2012) as volumes grew by a factor of ten will work in reverse against high feature devices. Especially in a market where color tablets are riding the growth curve down themselves. The primary distinguishing virtues of eink--outdoor readability and extreme low power consumption--are not as compelling to the mass market as us enthusiasts would prefer. I can easily draw up a wishlist of features that would make an eink reader preferable to an LCD tablet, for me, even at a higher price than a similar tablet. But the vast majority of shoppers wouldn't make that trade-off.
Amazon (and the other walled garden ebook vendors) are more interested in selling books so selling ten basic kindles is a better deal for them than selling five premium ereaders at double the price. And with the volume difference likely closer to ten-to-one than two-to-one, the business case just isn't there.
Most companies try to deploy their resources where they'll bring back the most money in return. For Amazon, these days, deploying a screenless android tablet disguised as a TV STB is going to bring in (a lot) more money than a high feature eink device could. Things will likely change at some point in the future but it won't be soon.
Alas.