Amazon dropping text-to-speech 
Amazon decides Kindle speech isn’t worth copyright fight

          
          
 Amazon also seems to feel confident that it's in the clear, legally. Its statement announcing the changes starts off pretty unambiguously: "Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given." Of course, the rest of the statement explains why, for business reasons, it's caving anyway. 
 It certainly isn't because Amazon views the flat, undramatic performances rendered by the Kindle's computerized voices a threat to the audio book business. The company, after all, owns two audio book companies, including market-leading Audible. 
 Instead, this has to do with Amazon's plans to dominate the e-book market. Recent announcements suggest the Kindle is only a part of a larger effort, as Amazon promises to make its proprietary e-book format available on a variety of platforms in an effort to ensure that, should e-books take off, it grabs the lion's share of the market. It's hard to say too much about these plans until Amazon announces what other platforms it's targeting or how they're enabled, but the key is to have as much exclusive book content as the company can license.
 In that sense, the text-to-speech is a disaster; it's not good enough to sell a significant volume of books, but it is problematic enough to scare away authors and publishers. Amazon recognizes this in stating, "we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat." As such, whoever has the rights to a text will now have the opportunity to determine whether that text is accessible to the text-to-speech capabilities.  
 Putting these rightsholders in the driver's seat when it comes to this ability will, Amazon hopes, allow it to stay in the driver's seat when it comes to selling their products. 


          
                  