Authors Guild to Kindle: shut up
Amazon's new eBook reader, the Kindle 2, was just announced on Monday, but it's already drawing complaints from the publishing industry.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Kindle 2's Text-to-Speech capability is being called a copyright violation.
The WSJ quotes Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, as saying: "They don't have the right to read a book out loud." According to Aiken: "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
Amazon has said that Kindle 2's Text-to-Speech feature makes it possible for the device to "read any book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you."
However, Amazon also notes that the feature uses text-to-speech technology, which no one would ever confuse with the dulcet tones of an author or actor's recitation in a recorded audiobook.
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