The Kindle Swindle?

To the minimal extent auto-reading of ebooks competes with audiobooks, it also increases the value of those ebooks. The answer for Blount and the Author's Guild is to price the ebook reproduction rights properly -- not legally impair what ebook owners can do with their own books, on their own devices.

I'm sympathetic to the plight of the starving (or even well-fed) writer wanting to get paid for their work. But the opinion espoused in this piece is the classic argument that just because an industry has grown accustomed to a particular revenue stream or business model, they should therefore always and forever have the privilege of keeping it. And anyone who introduces products or technology to prevent that or cut into their revenue is not playing fair, morally questionable, and/or should have to compensate them for lost revenue.

It's a ridiculous argument.

If I buy a book, I can freely record myself reading it. I then have an audio book. I own the book I bought, so recording myself (or anyone else) reading it is completely within my rights.

If I suddenly don't need to record myself, because technology reaches a point where a piece of software can read my book just as well as I can, then that's just the way it is.

If a temporary inconvenience creates a business opportunity for you, great. But you can't expect to hold onto that business once the inconvenience is gone.

The content industries need to understand that they can sell "a book" or "a movie", or "a song", but they can't sell music that only plays on certain devices, or DVDs that only play in certain continents, or books that you can read silently but not out loud. It's nonsense.

They should be grateful that the Amazon Kindle, a complement good to ebooks is so popular. How many books were purchased because of the Amazon Kindle? How many books will be bought because of the extra usefulness of the audio feature? Instead, they are biting the hand that feeds them. Not only that, but they are also obstructing the advancement of technology and innovation by reducing their usefulness. First Google Books and now this. What a bunch of ungrateful bastards - hardly better than the RIAA.

Text to speech is at best a 10% solution for the blind and those with impaired sight. The robotic voice that comes out of synthesizers is such a long way short of human cadence and intonation that the argument that the two compete is all but ludicrous for those in the know - i.e. those who have experience of both.

I can't take this guy seriously.