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.

The Authors Guild is upset with the new Kindle, claiming that its text to speech feature violates copyright.  Several comments have been made about the dubiousness of the claim. 

See the New York Times op-ed by the president of the Authors Guild called The Kindle Swindle.

See reaction to it by Boing Boing, Techdirt, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.