It’s worth noting that blame shouldn’t be placed on Amazon for this. It seems that Random House prefers greed over people. Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) and additional members of the Reading Rights Coalition are working to get Amazon to reverse this policy. Several publisher, to include Random House, have already told Amazon to turn text-to-speech off, cutting off a resource related to people with disabilities and a channel of mainstream media access.
Amazon’s response was to allow each publisher to decide whether the text-to-speech feature would be available for their titles. Many people with disabilities were happy to learn that the Kindle version 2.0 includes a text-to-speech feature, but their joy has been short-lived because the Authors Guild promptly pressured Amazon to remove the audio feature from Kindle due to concerns that it would interfere with sales of AudioBooks. The Disabled World website writes about the Kindles, back in 2009: Where the Authors Guild step over the line, in my opinion, is in their refusal to accept text-to-speech even in the capacity of accessibility. There is a group of users, however - larger than you may imagine - who will expect text-to-speech integration in a device like a Kindle and don’t mind its relative shortcomings: the visually impaired or disabled. It goes without saying that a computer reading text out loud - à la Siri - won’t sound anywhere near as good as a professionally voiced audiobook. Text-to-speech integration in technology is not mainstream enough for most people to consider as an alternative to audiobooks.
If a customer searches Audible for a title they’d like to listen to, then discovers it’s unavailable, it seems reasonable to assume the customer will simply do without. Many more books are available for Kindle than are available through Audible. Unfortunately, the library of audiobooks is much smaller than the library of ebooks. If a Kindle owner wants to listen to high quality and professionally recorded audio from a book, there are plenty of options available: the first which springs to mind is Audible, Amazon’s own audiobook service. This view seems very short sighted and greedy. It appears the concern raised is that reading a purchased book out loud would kill sales of audiobooks. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” “They don't have the right to read a book out loud. The quote that Paul Aitken, executive director of the Authors Guild, gave to explain the Guild’s decision is as follows: Needless to say, many publishers never allow it, even today. When Amazon first created the text-to-speech feature in their Kindle devices to read purchased books out loud, book publishers and the Authors Guild promptly claimed its use was illegal and forced Amazon to make the feature optional for every individual book.
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