I would have really thought Random House would have sent out a huge press release announcing this move, too. You almost get the impression they're trying to keep it quiet for some reason...

...to be blind.I guess Amazon discriminates against certain segments of the population and it allows the Publishers it contracts with to bully it into doing so.Good for them!

If you live in the world of MS Windows then yes, text-to-speech is FAR from replicating anything that remotely sounds like a human voice; Kindle borrows that same horrible robotic MS voice.

But the default text-to-speech voice available on Macs is surprisingly natural - it even mimics inhale/exhale breaths for paragraphs. So I could easily see this becoming a concern to authors in the near future.

Authors should just shut the f*** up. It's amazing that they base their arguments on de facto considerations, instead of on a coherent and consistent legal rationale. They allow it when it's not that good, but forbid it when it's "natural" sounding? Just STFU and stop presuming that copyright is an absolute right of ownership. It's NOT and was never meant to be (at least until the stupid DMCA was enacted by moronic US legislators, of course).

MacNN's habit recently of aiming for a hipper way of writing headlines, by mimicking the way Variety writes about the movie industry is getting more than annoying... Products don't 'bow', and publishers aren't 'Pubs'.

At first glance the headline implied that British pubs restricted the TTS, since it interfered with other patrons (a reasonable objection) - then I note it's just MacNN trying to be cool...

Here's a suggestion - be accurate, and reliable, then worry about 'cool'.

I think that all "text speakers/readers" must cease and desist since their voice mimics mine. And any work that they do will decrease my work since they are mimicking my voice. Or they could all pay me when they read a book for audio books. Just a thought. en

"...stop presuming that copyright is an absolute right of ownership. It's NOT and was never meant to be..."

and who, according to you, does own it?

as someone who made a big chunk of cash two years ago on a copyrighted work i'm most curious as to whom i should be sharing that with.

as someone who made a big chunk of cash two years ago on a copyrighted work i'm most curious as to whom i should be sharing that with.

Well, me, obviously.

testudo, i'm going to give you a thumbs up on that one. the first, and most likely the last, i'll give to you. there's just no denying that when i got the check i thought to myself, who would appreciate some of this? and you sprang to mind.

So, a person has already spent $10 bucks to purchase a book that cost virtually nothing to produce. And, now they can't have someone (or something) read it to them?

So, if a parent reads a book to their kids, is the author entitled to royalties because they lost money on the audio version?