News that the second iteration of the Amazon Kindle would have text-to-speech functionality prompted talk about the death of the audio book, but those fears appear to have been premature.
Amazon will now have rights holders opt in to the Kindle 2's "Read to Me" feature, the company announced on Friday, so it will likely take some time before Amazon gets approval from those rights holders on its entire collection.
The offering converts books into speech. Customers can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and can select a female or male voice. Read-to-Me also works for newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other personal documents.
"If you are in the kitchen and you want to put the feel like being read to, the Kindle will read to you," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the Kindle 2 launch, where he demoed the technology by having the Kindle 2 read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address aloud through its stereo speakers.
Rights holders were apparently not too thrilled with the feature. Amazon maintains that it has not violated any law with "Read to Me" but wants to respect the rights of copyright holders.
"Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given," the company said in a statement. "We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat."
Amazon pointed out that it is already invested in the audio book business via its Audible and Brilliance subsidiaries, and dismissed suggestions that "Read to Me" could kill the audio book business.
"We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audio books business," Amazon said.
As a result, rights holders can now decide on a book-by-book basis whether or not they want text-to-speech functionality to be enabled.
"With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is," Amazon said.
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May 11, 2009 1:55 AM
I work with handicapped children and adults. We welcome alternatives to the numerous books and magazines available only in print and we like the read-to-me option for times we cannot be at our desk with JAWS software or our 4-Track players from the Library of Congress. If you go one step further and provide words and speech at the same time, the dyslexic child can also learn to read words he could never quite get a handle on before without asking someone! Now you can add various vocabulary lists from various religious and medical groups to help extend to those, their own books that have a low print count and is needed by those wanting to be included in their various communities.