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The Coalition's mission statement says, "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra." (...) The Guild issued a statement following the protests, explaining its position: "The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights." If the guild is trying to gain sympathy, it will have a very difficult time when it pits "economic rights" against civil rights.

At present, very few of us buy books in any form. If we could have e-books read aloud to us, however, we would happily pay for them. We are an untapped market consisting of some 15 million people to which authors and publishers have never before had direct access. For this reason, the position of the Authors Guild is not only morally repugnant but also bad business. Prohibiting the blind and others from reading commercially available e-books just means that authors and publishers won't get our money. The guild's position hurts both authors and people with print disabilities. In an age when how we get information is constantly and rapidly changing, it's important that people with disabilities have access to it in the same way that it is important for us to have access to physical structures, goods and services. Amazon took an important step in the right direction by including a read-aloud feature on the Kindle 2, but the Authors Guild is now trying to set us back. We are not going to allow them to stand in the doorway of the virtual bookstore to keep us out.

The Authors Guild is pressuring Amazon to modify the Kindle 2 so that the synthetic speech function can only be used with the express authorization of the owner of the copyright of a work. A coalition of organizations that represent or work with persons with reading disabilities is organizing a protest to persuade the Guild to change its position. KEI supports the protest, and makes this statement on the Kindle 2 issue:

Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online. I think there's plenty not to like about the Kindle -- the DRM, the proprietary file format, both imposed on authors and publishers even if they don't want it -- and about Amazon's real audiobook section, Audible (the DRM -- again, imposed on authors and publishers even if they'd prefer not to use it). But if there's one thing Amazon has demonstrated, it's that it plans on selling several bazillion metric tons of audiobooks. They control something like 90 percent of the market. To accuse them of setting out to destroy it just doesn't pass the giggle-test.

Amazon has announced that it will give authors and publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech function on any or all of their e-books available for the Kindle 2. The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd

A coalition of organizations representing people who cannot read print will protest the removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 at the Authors Guild headquarters in NY City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, 12 to 2:00 p.m. Join us there! Manon

Listening to the examples demonstrates that nobody non-blind and non-masochistic would use the Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature. And as blind people can't use the Kindle 2, what is the point of that feature - and of the Authors' Guild ruckus about it?

February 25, 2009. Text-to-speech (TTS) programs have been in use for a number of years, and they're improving. As Roy Blount says in an op-ed in today's New York Times, Kindle 2's TTS isn't Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter," but it's listenable. There's no need to take our word for it; have a listen to the sample below.

Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature that reads text aloud with a computer-generated voice. "They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

In 2005, the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit against Google arising from the Google Books project. In October 2008, the parties announced a proposed settlement. Academics and rightsholders have criticized the Settlement terms on grounds ranging from antitrust to privacy. The Settlement sets forth non-privacy terms, including provisions regarding royalties and book advertising, in great detail. However, it does not contain meaningful privacy protections for readers or authors. Various entities and individuals have filed comments, objections, and amicus curiae briefs concerning the proposed settlement.

Same as in Forbes' but on the NFB site with contact info

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright. Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2". More details are available on the Forbes website.

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there's another thing about Kindle 2 - its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there's another thing about Kindle 2 - its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

Publishers and authors now have the power to silence the Kindle 2 e-book reader. Amazon.com Inc. reversed course Friday on the device's controversial text-to-speech feature, which reads digital books aloud in a robotic voice. The company gave rights holders the ability to disable the feature for individual titles.

"An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on either issue." (Reading Rights protest about disabling TTS and people grumbling about books over $9.99)

This isn't a new issue. George Kerscher and I wrote a major essay on the topic seven(!) years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it's a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! More on that in another essay. The essence of the Soundproof Book essay was the dueling moral high grounds: author's rights vs. the right to access. Since these are both generally good from society's standpoint, how do you handle the conflict between them?

"Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2," Dr. Maurer [President of the National Federation of the Blind] continued. "We note, however, that the device itself cannot be used independently by a blind reader because the controls to download a book and begin reading it aloud are visual and therefore inaccessible to the blind. We urge Amazon to rectify this situation as soon as possible in order to make the Kindle 2 a device that truly can be used both by blind and sighted readers. By doing so, Amazon will make it possible for blind people to purchase a new book and begin reading it immediately, just as sighted people do."