Melville House Books

Amazon promises that “now Kindle can read to you.” But divided opinion over whether Amazon’s Kindle 2 Text-to-Speech function infringes on authors’ and publishers’ audio rights is unlikely to be united by the inevitable court battles. In this op-ed for the New York Times, Author’s Guild president (and author of twenty-one books) Roy Blount, Jr. sketches the union’s position.

In an unintentional rejoinder, Neil Gaiman (who posts 25 books and a separate “selection” of his uncountable number of Comics on his Web site), who has been shilling for Kindle 2 (see here) recounts an argument with his agent about the new technology in this post on his blog.

Meanwhile, in this comment on Endgadget “ex-copyright attorney” Nilay Patel discusses what’s at stake, saying “This is actually pretty tough stuff — as far as edge cases go, this one pushes right up against the boundaries of the current law.”