I’m sorry Dave, I can’t read that Kindle eBook to you

This means your Kindle can read aloud any book you buy on the device — something which the Author’s Guild didn’t look too kindly on. You see, its authors’ hold special rights for the recordings of audiobooks based on their works. Of course, this feature isn’t the same thing an audiobook, but that didn’t stop Amazon from backing down today.

Amazon will now let authors choose on a title-by-title basis if the text-to-speech functionality will be enabled. It announced this move in a release that starts with the sentence: “Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.” While it stands to reason that this is legal (after all, you have this same text-to-speech on any computer), Amazon clearly didn’t want to upset the group that provides it with all that content.