Well, the Authors Guild successfully whined Amazon into making its text-to-speech reader optional. My only question is: did Roy Blount ever hear this thing reading a book? It’s much closer to Stephen Hawking than a professional audiobook, and authors have absolutely nothing to fear from it.
I couldn’t follow the awkwardly pausing reading of the simple list in the video above (although I do love how it mangles the very word “ebook” at 0:43); I can’t even imagine pleasurably listening to dialogue on this thing.
The bottom line is that the Authors Guild was simply wrong on this one. Until someone come up with a computer that can understand the meaning of what it’s reading, this is a non-issue.
