MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Amazon Caves on Text-To-Speech

astromusic · 03-02-2009, 05:58 PM

Folks, I think some of you are definitely over-reading stuff into Amazon's announcement. They were very careful to say that they will incorporate a DRM feature that will enable copyright holders to be in the "driver's seat" in terms of restricting TTS on specific books. They never said they will remove the TTS feature from Kindle 2.

I think there is another subtle thing going on here. The AG wanted them to charge $1.75 per book to enable TTS. Amazon are saying, no, you get to disable TTS or enable TTS, but not price differentially. In this manner, I think Amazon is basically setting it up so that it will be unattractive for the copyright holders to disable TTS, and most books will be available with TTS enabled. The announcement so much as comes out and says that. In the meantime, the wind has been taken out of the sails of Author's Guild, which was getting huge mileage in the press (the NYT even ran an op-ed piece titled "Kindle Swindle").

I am actually pretty optimistic about all this.

03-02-2009, 05:58 PM	#67
astromusic Member Posts: 16 Karma: 10 Join Date: Feb 2009 Device: Kindle 2	Folks, I think some of you are definitely over-reading stuff into Amazon's announcement. They were very careful to say that they will incorporate a DRM feature that will enable copyright holders to be in the "driver's seat" in terms of restricting TTS on specific books. They never said they will remove the TTS feature from Kindle 2. I think there is another subtle thing going on here. The AG wanted them to charge $1.75 per book to enable TTS. Amazon are saying, no, you get to disable TTS or enable TTS, but not price differentially. In this manner, I think Amazon is basically setting it up so that it will be unattractive for the copyright holders to disable TTS, and most books will be available with TTS enabled. The announcement so much as comes out and says that. In the meantime, the wind has been taken out of the sails of Author's Guild, which was getting huge mileage in the press (the NYT even ran an op-ed piece titled "Kindle Swindle"). I am actually pretty optimistic about all this.