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When it comes to digitizing books and offering readers and writers a business model, Google has planted the wheat, harvested it, threshed it, ground it, and baked it. Now Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo think they each deserve a big slice of bread. They are taking the hen to court in order to get it. The effort, led by attorney Gary Reback, to challenge Google's deals with writers and publishers for digitizing "orphaned works" that are copyrighted but no longer published is less lawsuit than business by another name.

So I buy a Kindle book for my Kindle 2. It downloads to my machine. I open up the book -- it has no relation (except the relation of "not") to the book I ordered. Three emails, 4 days later, Amazon has still not responded to the problem. I wonder how they begin to discover/fix such a problem.

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

I'm working on a story to actually assess the state of development among big-name textbook publishers and will have more soon on that. For right now, though, it's quite clear that we have a very long ways to go. While a lack of content is a major issue, perhaps a bigger issue is the lack of standards via which the content can be disseminated. Obviously, DRM is a serious problem for textbooks. Copyright aside, though, there are currently around 30 formats in which e-books are published. If you're Pearson, into which basket will you be throwing all of your eggs? Frankly, there is only one that I see that makes a lot of sense right now. EPUB, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, is open, XML-based, and can grow as our needs increase. Even this format, though, needs traction with major publishers.

Closely aligned to the DRM issue is that there are a multiplicity of e-book formats, many of which cannot be read on other devices. As with DRM, consumer frustration is bound to arise if readers have to jump through hoops to read legally purchased books. This is perhaps not a problem at the moment, when the bulk of e-reader owners are early adopters, yet it will become more acute when the devices are more widely disseminated among less tech-savvy users. As Kassia Krozser, co-founder of medialoper.com who writes widely on digital entertainment issues, blogs on her publishing site Booksquare.com: "DRM, as implemented now, does not deter piracy. It does deter reading." She later reminds publishers that "your customers (again: the ones who give you money) don't read on one device, on one operating system, in one location. As you move forward with your digital initiatives, think about how real people read books."

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.

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.

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."