The New York Times carries an op-ed article by Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr. with the provocative title The Kindle Swindle? The Guild has attacked Amazon over the Kindle feature enabling readers to listen to the texts of their Kindle books read by a computer voice.

The Guild’s position is that Amazon is not paying royalties for the text-to-speech versions, and that the Kindle may be infringing on audio rights reserved to authors, book publishers, or legitimate audio companies. E-Reads’ Michael Gaudet has commented extensively on the controversy and strongly recommends that interested parties sort this out through discussion and negotiation. If they don’t, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. The audio business is a billion dollar one, a sum worth going to court over.

“You may be thinking.” writes Blount, “that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading ‘Harry Potter’ or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version…And that sort of technology is improving all the time. I.B.M. has patented a computerized voice that is said to be almost indistinguishable from human ones. This voice is programmed to include ‘ums,’ ‘ers’ and sighs, to cough for attention, even to ‘shhh’ when interrupted.”

Author Guild has released a demo of a Kindle audio reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Any ums? Any ers? Judge for yourself, but if I’m Abe Lincoln I’m on the horn with my lawyer faster than you can say Jeff Bezos.

RC