Amazon has caved in to demands by the Authors Guild over the text-to-speech feature in Amazon’s Kindle 2 ebook reading device. Copyright holders will now be able to decide whether the feature will be available for their particular ebooks.

Whilst maintaining that the feature is legal and does not infringe copyright, Amazon seems to have made a pragmatic decision based on keeping publishers and authors happy (and avoiding litigation).

This is surely a win for the Authors Guild whose president, Roy Blount Jr. recently argued in an op-ed in the The New York Times that the feature undermined the market for professional audio books.

Source: Brad Stone, “Amazon Backs Off Text-to-Speech Feature in Kindle,” The New York Times, February 27, 2009

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