That I did always love...
February 2009
The headline is a little misleading, it makes it look as if Amazon is going to cripple the Kindle 2. What they actually did is basically tell the industry to go fuck themselves, then suggested that they will add a flag to their content which will allow the content creators to disable the text-to-speech feature.
In other words, Amazon is not going to do anything about it (apart from patching the Kindle so it acts based on this flag), if you don’t like text-to-speech, you will have to resubmit your content marked with text-to-speech disabled.
What the industry doesn’t understand is that 9- days after this feature kicks in, they are going to put out a press release with a statistical breakdown of how much content is available for the Kindle, versus how much content has been marked with text-to-speech disabled. Something tells me most of it won’t be marked as such.
Then it’s going to get better: the Writer’s Guild original target was Amazon, this is why they made so much noise, they simply wanted money. But what is going to happen now is that if any author takes offense, they can’t sue Amazon. Amazon provided their due diligence in this issue and responded with the content flag, if the author is not happy, then he/she will have to take the fight to the publisher, and any lawsuits will be between writer and publisher.
Amazon walks away, smelling like a rose.
I love pretty romantic things. Since my youngest twin boys have autism, I have not been able to have pretty things about. But they are older now and I’m finding myself yearning to get the pretty girl stuff out again! I wonder if the twins are ready now? They like pretty things, too, though, and that’s part of the problem! My things tend to disappear and show up broken later. <sigh>
I want to see Bigfoot in person someday. What 1 strange or wierd thing do you want to do or see or have happen to you before you die?
