Selectively.

A few days after the release of the improved version of it’s eBook reader Kindle, Amazon has announced that it would give publishers the right to turn off the “text-to-speech” option for specific titles as they see fit. This decision was taken following protests voiced out by the president of the Authors Guild, Roy Blount Jr., in his write-up in NewYork times. As per Blount, “Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights” and this undermined the market for the professional audio books that are sold separately.

Amazon, on the other hand, maintained that the feature is completely legal, and on the contrary, would increase the market for audio books.  They said that they “strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

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