Text-to-speech: Amazon caves

There’s been a lot of interesting copyright controversies lately.  Given the economic realities of betting an entire business on a lawsuit with an uncertain outcome, though, the controversies almost never seem to reach a judicial determination of legality or illegality. Unsurprisingly, it looks like the controversy over text-to-speech in the Kindle 2 is going to [...]

Wil Wheaton is man enough to take on a disembodied electronic voice

First of all, Wil Wheaton is awesome.  I think I was one of the few people who didn’t greatly detest Wesley Crusher, so I had no great bias against him.  However, he won my heart as the Best Geek Ever in his Slashdot interview, when he related this tale: Once, I was working on a [...]

Authors Guild President on the “Kindle Swindle”

Continuing the back-and-forth over the new Kindle’s text-to-speech feature, Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times.  Along with coming up with a snappy, derogatory catch phrase (is the “Kindle Swindle” an argument against unfairly exploiting authors, or the next dance craze?  you be the judge!), he [...]

Is Kindle’s text-to-speech a “public performance”?

Amazon recently released a new version of its Kindle E-book reader. Among the new features in the updated reader is the ability to have the reader perform a text-to-speech conversion to render the book in audio form. The Author’s Guild, however, was not amused: Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature [...]