The Blind Demand Return of Kindle's Speech

When the new version of Amazon’s Kindle launched users were pleased to note that it had a text-to-speech function.

That said, not everyone was happy with the new feature. Publishing houses aired their grievances about Text-to-Speech on the device and how it would cannibalize sales of audiobooks. Why would anyone buy an audiobook if they could buy the text version and just have their Kindle read it to them?

Executive director of the Authors Guild (AG) Paul Aiken told the Wall Street Journal that the feature violated authors' copyrights, as Amazon doesn't own the rights for audio recordings. Amazon solved the problem by offering the Text-to-Speech feature as an option per publication, rather than a standard function.

Well, it turns out there are people who buy books and want their Kindle to read to them, because they are visually impaired. The National Federation for the Blind (NFB) held protests this week outside the Manhattan offices of the Authors Guild. The group of 150 and 250 people were banding together in hopes to reverse the Guild's threat to disable text-to-speech from e-books for the Kindle 2.

According to CNet, Paul Aiken said the AG came up with a plan that would have given the blind and visually impaired access to the Kindle's voice function regardless of whether publishers chose to disable the technology, however the NFB shunned the offer, saying it was "burdensome" for the blind to prove their disability or pay extra for the text-to-speech version of books.

A few of you raised this very concern when we reported Amazon had made Text-to-Speech optional back in February so we’re curious to hear your thoughts now. While it seems like Aiken’s offer of providing special access to Text-to-Speech on all books seems like the best they can do, we can see the point the NFB is trying to make.