Friday, October 19, 2012

week 7

In the first article this week what caught my attention was this paragraph: "The guild is also accused of wanting to profiteer off family bedtime rituals. A lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sarcastically warned that “parents everywhere should be on the lookout for legal papers haling them into court for reading to their kids.” That is just a smartass comment meant to ruffle feathers and serve absolutely no good purpose. If you want people to take you seriously about a wrong you feel has been committed against you (profiting off ereaders without sharing the profits) then you need to remain cool headed. If you start acting like a child having a temper tantrum people will tune you out.

I didn't see the demo for the kindle 2 on the third link. I did a search for kindle 2 which brought up 30 pages of results. I tried to refine it from there by searching kindle 2 demo. I also didn't see a demo. I did find some more articles about the author's guild but it wasn't any new information that isn't included in the other links.

As far as the debate about text to speech undermining audio book sales I think there is a lot of merit to it. I go looking specifically for audio books that I want to be able to listen to instead of read and I pay for them. The writers and publishers are making money off from my purchases. If I get them for free from something like the kindle 2 that leaves a lot of people no longer making money off from me having the book. In this day and age the last thing we need is yet another loophole to take money out of someone's pocket or a job away from them.

To be continued......have a baby awake crying upstairs


2 comments:

  1. I completely hear you with the sarcastic tone given in the statement “parents everywhere should be on the lookout for legal papers haling them into court for reading to their kids". This did however give me and extreme chuckle as I am an overly sarcastic person. I was also unable to watch the Kindle 2 demo because of an error and was able to find a demo online. The Kindle 2 is kind of old news at this point though as I believe Amazon has put out two newer versions of the Kindle since then. I can promise you though that the text-to-speech option was horrible. The voice was so robotic and syllable splitting that I could not stand to listen to it.

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  2. That's exactly what I thought when I read that line, too. What a mud-slinger.
    I honestly don't think the audio book industry has that much to worry about. If Lynn is correct about the robotic voice, I'd much rather have Samuel L. Jackson read to me than some computer. I'd still be willing to pay (or more likely, check it out from a library) for the the quality of a real human reading to me.

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