Kindles, Text to Speech and Audiobooks, oh my!

Cory Doctorow wrote this in the Guardian (and turned it into a Tweet, which is how I found it), which made me think about four things at the same time -

1: That settles the Kindle issue. I'm not buying one. If I own technology, it does as I say and does not run home to mama whenever mama decides it should.

2: I'm not actually surprised that Amazon have revealed they can do this. At some point in the development of the Kindle, after the boffins and geeks had worked out what it could do they let lawyers loose on it. The lawyers saw what the Kindle could do and then proceeded to work out what it could do that they could end up in litigation over. Once they knew that, they very sensibly advised the boffins to install an "off" switch.

3: Now that we know the Kindle can have a feature disabled (by code in the e-book, I assume) it's a matter of time before someone hacks it*(. Were e-book readers interesting before?

4: Audiobooks are a separate product, at least in my mind. So someone, somewhere, is potentially misjudging the audience. If, or generally when, I buy an audiobook it's because I want to hear the book being read by a specific voice. After an appalling experience with an audio version of "Ender's Game" I was reconverted by the performance - best way to describe it - of "Coraline" by Neil Gaiman. How cool, to have the author read his own work?

I would pay really quite a lot of money to hear an interesting voice read an interesting book, but I will pay no money to have a machine read to me. I want the performance, not just the sound.

Now, admittedly, there is something to be addressed about some people being unable to read a print edition, for whatever reason, and therefore buying an audiobook as a replacement for a print copy or e-edition; the kindle would cut down on that market. Audiobooks tend to be more expensive because of production costs, one assumes.



*wait...let me leap to a conclusion. If the Kindle runs code that interacts with hardware, and that code is based in the e-book, how long before the e-book reader becomes a target for malware of some kind? What sort of malware would a Kindle attract? Adware, one assumes, or if the Kindle connects with a PC it might be an vector for getting code past the normal defenses.

And if i've thought of it, I'm sure someone else will.