Kindle Raising Heat

Amazon’s new Kindle 2 is causing controversy. A new feature “text-to-speech” is being discredited by the Author’s Guild as copyright infringement since it allows the work to be “performed.”

Once again, Neil Gaiman has some wit and sense:

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.

I’ll agree with him, how about you?

For more info on this subject, BoingBoing.net will provide it here.

As for Kindle itself, I am on the fence. While I see the many benefits, there is something to be said for having an actual book.