Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Kindle 2

I'm back! Actually, this is more of a quick flyover; I expect to be blogging more sometime next month. Still, I couldn't resist linking to this Op-Ed piece in the New York Times from the Authors Guild president. Amen brother.
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2 comments:

ryan field said...

I saw them promoting K2 on a news program early yesterday morning. They really pushed the audio thing. At first I thought, wonderful, then I realized two of my books are available in audio versions and I'm getting royalties...until they start downloading on the K2.

Glad you decided to flyover. I have a weird way of reading blogs. I use my own blog roll first, then yours to read publishing blogs.

February 25, 2009 at 12:08 PM
Jodi Meadows said...

Good article. Thanks for linking.

I have two thoughts about the text-to-speech thing.

On one hand, that's *really* cool and useful, and all the advances the article mentions about computer voices really shows how far technology has come. I remember ancient computer voices that couldn't pronounce anything right. They said my name jod-ee. :(

On the other hand, rights and monies. Pretty much all the reasons that have been covered already.

A friend of mine has the K2. She loves it, and has used the text-to-speech feature; she says it's no substitute for a human voice, but it's useful when she's driving to work. I haven't heard it with my own ears, so I couldn't say. (I'm an ink-stained tree corpse girl, myself. For a number of reasons.)

But just because it's not comparable *now doesn't mean it won't be. The advances in technology are just crazy. It's only a matter of time before computers sound real, and where will they draw the line?

:S

February 26, 2009 at 6:59 AM

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