“Yes, but what about 10 years from now, will computer generated voices be much better? Perhaps still not as good as a human, but maybe good enough for the average person?”

No.

Yes, but what about 10 years from now, will computer generated voices be much better? Perhaps still not as good as a human, but maybe good enough for the average person?
It’s like the difference between mp3s and lossless compression. I can tell the difference on some types of music, and so can many musicians. But the average person can’t, and mp3 is just fine with them.

So it’s not so much about the Kindle 2, but really more about setting a precedent that will be enforced as technology matures. Someday, computer generated voices WILL be good enough to make a human reading a book be not worth the expense. That is what the argument is about.

Now, is that something to be concerned about? Maybe not, maybe it’s just a licensing issue. Or maybe too much licensing would kill off the technology before it starts up.

Honestly, that doesn’t pain me all that much.

I do think that if his intent was about licensing fees, it was a poor forum to do it in (industry internal issue vs consumer issue)

I read ebooks that way frequently. I know, to someone who hasn’t tried it and is probably expecting some atrociously toneless voice, this might seem strange.

But I’ve found that some text to speech software actually creates a reasonably decent sounding voice that’s a lot better sounding than the often bad readings I’ve encountered in many audiobooks. I recently tryed to listen to an audiobook version of THE HOST by Stephanie Meyers and even if I’d liked the book, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to sit through the horrible,exaggerated and often totally inappropriate-to-the-character voices the reader did for different characters.

We forget that when we look at the page and read in our minds that nuances of tone aren’t there on the page—our imaginations add them.

And with a decent text to speech voice which is not as far from a real voice as you’d probably think I find my imagination has no more trouble adding in the nuances than it does when I look at printed text.

As to WHY I read them that way, I’m a painter and like to listen to books whiling I’m working—of course I read books the typical way lots too—as my straining book shelves will attest.

Kindle’s not the first ebook reader to have text-to-speech (not by a long shot), but Amazon grabbed the tiger by the tail by enabling it without checking with the copyright owners first. It’ll be interesting to see if they take the Authors Guild on in court or not (Amazon can presumably afford more lawyers than small outfits like Fictionwise, MobiPocket, eBooks.com, etc.).

While you’re in New York, try Molly’s Pub & Shebeen on 21st and Third Ave for the best burger in the city. Seriously. The best.

Now, granted, some audio readers are vastly better than others, but we’d rather just have the neutral voice so we can interpret ourselves. It can get quite hokey with others reading, and most importantly, it makes it easier to make the computer voice go fast fast fast, which is how we usually read. You can speed up live audio, of course, but everyone ends up sounding like a chipmunk.

If you can’t read the book with your eyes and thus form your own interpretation of the book, a neutral computerized voice is the next best thing to your own “inside your head” book reading voice.

Anyway, I’m glad kindle is going audio, it helps us a lot. And then we have more of a choice as to read via a real person or computer. To me, this seems like access, not a copyright violation, as before we did not have access to kindle books at all, and they are quite a bit cheaper than audio books. It is nice to get first run books without having to wait for audio or library for the blind to get around to them.