Amazon Silences Kindle 2 by Request

[JMcEntegart]

When the second generation Kindle came out everyone was all a flap because the first version had been sold out for months. Ever since Oprah sang the praises of the device on her chat show, they’d been in short supply.

Amazon Silences Kindle 2 by Request : Read more

 

[jsloan]

:-(
total nonsense. as if the price on the device and books were not high enough. amazon caves in and reduces pruduct's feature list. publishing houses don't care about their customers only about making more money...

 

[kamkal]

errr flop.

 

[niz]

Whatever happened to making products that put the whats good for the customer first?

I want an open ebook reader that doesn't force you into buying ebooks from one particular place, supports PDF, and doesn't support or promote DRM in any way. Furthermore I don't want it to have extra stuff like the phone connectvity the Kindle has. It both increases the cost and reduces the battery life, just so they can lock you into a channel to buy books through. I just want a simple reader.

Also the reader should be accessable as a generic storage device, so that it doesn't need any drivers or other software to be installed on a PC just to be able to copy ebooks to it. Extra minus points when the manufacturer assumes everyone only runs windows, so only provides windows versions of necessary software. What about Linux users?

The Kindle and Kindle 2 both fail on most if not all those points. I'll keep waiting until the ebook reader that puts my needs first comes out.

 

[Guest]

It's a load of nonsense. Ten seconds listening to even the best text-to-speech shows how unlike human speech it truly is. Are the publishing houses going to demand that all PC-based TTS programs be withdrawn from the market, too?

 

[HolyCrusader]

I've never seen much point of the Kindle - it seemed overpriced and feature-light when comparing it to a similarly-priced Palm device (TX for example).

Despite my reservations with the Kindle, I do have to side with Amazon on this and say that the Author's Guild is far overreacting. A computer's Text to Voice capabilities still need a lot of work before they can match the human voice in sound and inflection. Even an untalented voice actor will have more inflection than a computer-generated voice. Thus, I feel that fans of Audio Books would still stick with the 'standard' human voice narrating for the quality.

When I think of it, the Author's Guild is, in a way, trying to censor or silence something it considers a threat or competition. Ironic that an organization that generally would oppose generally oppose censorship is now trying to use a form of censorship for their own purpose?

 

[hellwig]

Uh oh, I think I reported Old Man Dotes to the moderators, sorry, meant to click the quote button.

[citation][nom]Old Man Dotes[/nom]Are the publishing houses going to demand that all PC-based TTS programs be withdrawn from the market, too?[/citation]

There's enough DRM on most eBooks to prevent regular TTS programs from working on copyright-ed books. TTS for Word or PDF might be nice for reports and whatnot, but the second you can buy a best-seller in .DOC format, hell will have frozen over.

 

[jsloan]

one of the sad things about amazon's service is that it requires a kindle. they dont' offer it to the pc or to pda or smartphone, ect. so you have to buy their overpriced hardware. i also heard an interview where they said it does not do wifi, only works with 3g. wtf, everyone has wifi at home, work. why not put it in there. why put it over 3g alone, eventually they will be asking for moe $$$, just wait. that 3g bandwidth costs someone who will want a cut from kindle users.

 

[Guest]

I don't know what the deal is?
Don't like it? Don't buy it!

 

[Guest]

Does this also mean I can't read to my kids? I've never gotten permission from the rightsholders.

 

[Pei-chen]

Shouldn't the Author’s Guild be called Waitress' Guild in time like this?

 

[myriad46]

Finally a device that offers accessibility to individuals with low-vision and blindness, and they have to go and whine about copyright infringement. How many people who would normally buy the print version, then go and buy the audio version, or visa versa? Is it really going to affect sales? This is a good example, as well, of laws not keeping up with technology. It's not an audio recording. What's next? Are we going to have to pay for subtitles on TV? Are we going to have to pay royalties to spain/mexico, when a movie is dubbed. This is a ridiculous lawsuit that spits in the face of increased accessibility and the advancement of technology.

 

[wdmso]

What will be next you can no longer read a book out loud to your children! for fear the some one who hasn't bought the book may be listening PLEASE

 

[seatrotter]

What are you people whining about? The visually-impaired are at fault here. They chose to be that way, thus they should pay more (I take it it costs more for a braile/audio version of books/magazines/etc?). They should be punished, darn it!

What do you think we are in? The stone-age? Gone are the days the authors (artists, etc.) are compensated for encouragement and innovation, ultimately for the better of society. They deserve every bit of money they can squeeze out from everyone.

 

[pocketdrummer]

This is ALL overpriced. I'm still not going to buy this...

 

[shaggyman]

The many comments I have seen ask why not buy the audiobook instead of using the Kindle "robotic" text reader don't understand the central issue of availability. I am always searching for audiobooks, belong to Audible, get them from the public library, rent them from Recorded Books. Nevertheless the human-read audiobooks are a tiny fraction of the library of book available to the Kindle. Particularly for nonfiction works of history and politics human read the available audiobooks are skimpy indeed.

The criticisms of the synthesized voice seem to me a glass half full-glass half empty issue. While the overwhelming number of comments on these blogs disparage the synthesized voices as too robotic to bear, I have been impressed at how human sounding they have become, how large their vocabularies, how few plain errors of pronunciation they make, and the degree to which they can phrase a sentence correctly, inflect a question correctly, etc. When an actor reads they supply the emotional nuance. When you read printed text you supply it yourself. The computer reader is somewhere in the middle. I have "read" maybe 200 books using a computer reader to supplement human read audiobooks. In almost all cases the text was one that no audiobook company offered for sale and probably never will.