I am not an owner of the Amazon’s Kindle, and I have no plans to own on in the near future. However, having a text-to-speech feature on a Kindle seemed to be a good idea, because many disabled customers have finally the ability to listen to thousands of books instantly with the portable e-book devices.

But the eBook rights-holders have complained that the text-to-speech feature on the Kindle is not fair on Amazon’s part, partly because it undermines the audio book industry. Amazon has replied to those charges by stating that the text-to-speech feature is not a performance, and thus it does not infringe on the rights of Author’s Guild.

But nevertheless Amazon has caved into the Guild’s demands and just announced that it would allow content owners to disable the text-to-speech feature on the Kindle as those owners see fit. This is probably a huge blow to visually disabled customers, because many of them really could have gained access to unprecedented amount of text due to Kindle’s ability. Besides, Kindle’s text-to-speech feature isn’t that great. I can understand Amazon’s position in trying to appease the Author’s Guild, but I just don’t understand why the Guild is making such a fuss over this particular feature. The Kindle cannot produce the same professional reading voice as an audio book.

I say greed is behind the Guild’s motivation. Shame and shame.