A few days ago, Amazon announced the new Kindle 21. Now, I won't go into it much since, honestly, I don't care to spend over $300 on a device to let me read digital documents (and 10¢ per if you want your own docs). But it does feature an interesting feature for a portable reader: text-to-speech. Unfortunately, the Author's Guild doesn't care for it too much:
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."
It's not an audio-book. It's not a recording. It's not a derivative work. By that same argument, story-time at local libraries is a "derivative under copyright law." Boing Boing agrees, so does Jon Gruber… and Neil Gaiman, you know, the author; the same person presumably represented by the Author's Guild.
- Sidenote, why the hell does Amazon still insist on using an image for their announcements on the front page? Is it that hard for them to properly format divs and paragraphs? [↩]
