Einar Magnús

karenh:

The Author’s Guild is not happy with the new Kindle’s
text-to-speech feature as they feel it violates copyright.

But Neil Gaiman disputes the issue with his agent and writes this on his online journal:

“My point of view: When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it…”
(via boing boing via neil gaiman)

But regardless of the copyright issue, I sure hope no parents see this functionality as a comparable alternative to reading aloud to their children.

Seriously?! Are the copyright proponents purposely trying to piss me off? At least I can continue to respect Neil Gaimon.