I’ve been following all the brouhaha between Amazon and the Authors Guild. In a nutshell, the Amazon ships with a text-to-speech feature that turns any book you buy into a slightly creepy, but free, audio book.
The Authors Guild protested this move as being unfair to authors. I believe the real reason behind this protest was the thought that this free text-to-speech would eat into the sale of audio books. While I don’t think that is true in this version of the Kindle (just try to listen to more than 3 minutes of Kindle’s text-to-speech without driving your car into a tree), the existing free text-to-speech capability sets a precedence that has significant future ramifications. In other words, when the Hugh Jackman text-to-speech Kindle ships, the audio book market might feel just collapse.
Many people have railed against Amazon for caving to the Authors Guild. I think they missed the point. I believe Amazon did exactly the right (and noble) thing by allowing authors to choose whether Kindle is allowed to text-to-speech their work. How could that be wrong? Amazon, as an author, I salute you!
Love him or hate him, Paul Harvey was the voice of the radio and was unquestionably an influence to all who followed in his news media footsteps. I grew up listening to Paul Harvey and will miss his folkiness and dramatic pauses.
Fox has revealed that former Star Trek: The Next Generation cast members Patrick Stewart, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden, Michael Dorn, Wil Wheaton, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner, and Jonathan Frakes will lend their voices to the March 29 episode of Family Guy “Not All Dogs Go to Heaven.”
@Ihnatko Wearing my new 511 tactical pants. Best feature? The pockets are big enough to hold a Kindle. Puzzled by this webbed strap in back. in reply to Ihnatko#
it’s a front-end for SQLite that removes the need to write SQL for most operations. It makes development of SQLite-backed applications considerably faster.
