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Originally Posted by jhowell
Yes, it first appeared in firmware version 5.13.1. This is the first report of the feature being active that I know of.
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I can't recall exactly when I found it was working, but I've been using it for at least a year, probably at least two.
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This is pretty fascinating. IIRC @jhowell found some references to Text to Speech in one of the updates awhile back. Why they would choose to enable it in China, of all places?
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My guess is that if they're pulling Kindle out of the Chinese market that they've been struggling and Chinese executives might have been given the leeway to turn on features that aren't available elsewhere, and they assumed no one would notice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Also, @Devot3d, perhaps you could share one of the ASINs so others can try stuff?
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I don't mind, This is the one I've been using: B078N42JWX but I suspect it is only whitelisted on my device.
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Originally Posted by j.p.s
The first 6 characters of the S/N are needed to remove all model ambiguity,
5 are not enough.
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I had no idea, they are "G001 6T"
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
It's either not a regular PW4 or else you've bought some (Whitelisted) ebooks that turn on normally blocked features of a PW4.
If it's a stock PW4 (=10th gen PW) then likely only the specific ASINs will enable TTS, so you've already discovered the only solution.
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I subscribed to the Chinese Kindle Unlimited and in the time I was using it the only book lacking the TTS feature was Harry Potter, so it behaves as though it is normally unblocked.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Which Kindle model do you actually have? It really does not sound like it is any Kindle that has ever existed. Only generation 2/3/4 Kindles had TTS feature, and this is going back 11 years now.
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Amazon recently stopped selling Kindles in China, and will stop selling e-books there next year.
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I'm amazed, first I'd heard this was your post, and I go look at the website and yup, shutting it down. Guess I've gotta make sure I've got everything downloaded before June 2024 because they're shutting the servers down then.
My chinese is not really great, but from a quick search of Chinese websites I'm not finding any mention of newer models of kindles having TTS...
So if I'm the only one to have figured this out and posted about it online I can see why they're shutting down, they're just not selling enough devices and books.
