The Kindle text to speech feature has created a controversy on both the legal issue of copyright, and the business/consumer issue of the merits of computerized text to speech vs. audio books using voice actors.

Those on the voice actor side say that a computer generated voice just can’t match a human voice for subtlety, tone and context.  (At least not yet.)

On the copyright front, Amazon has decided that – despite its position that there is no copyright violation in text to speech – it won’t offer the feature for books if the author doesn’t want it.

In a CNN article, David Ciccarelli of Voices.com - a London, Ont. service that matches voice actors with those seeking to hire them – points out that Amazon is hedging its bets, as it also owns  Audible, a  service that sells professionally narrated audiobooks.