The Kindle 2 audio-reading feature: Convenient, compromised, contentious

The most dramatic enhancement to the Kindle 2, Amazon's second-generation e-book reader, is one that allows you to have the device read to you any book you've purchased—or any other content you load onto the device. Amazon bills the capability as "experimental," presumably to limit expectations.

Indeed, in our initial tests today of what Amazon calls the "Read-To-Me" feature, the voices sound somewhat stilted, as one might expect from software that converts printed text to audible words on the fly. Sentences lack the cadence of real speech and the feature occasionally outright flubs words. In one book I played, it pronounced the word "philosopher" as "phil-LO-sopher." In reading a memo written in block capitals that I had e-mailed to the Kindle, the device mispronounced the pronoun "IT" as "I.T.," as in the corporate department that takes care of computers. (To hear what text-to-voice technology sounds like, listen to this example, which isn't necessarily the exact programming used by the Kindle 2. The video review we're now preparing will have recordings of the Read-To-Me feature in action.)

[UPDATE: You'll find our video review of the Amazon Kindle 2 in our next post, The Kindle 2: A review of a fine device. —Ed.]

You can even run the feature on Spanish-language text, and to somewhat-amusing effect. It reads Spanish by using English phonetic pronunciation, and so sounds like a bit like Spanish read by a politically incorrect comedian, or by me, a non-Spanish-speaker with no natural gift for speaking foreign languages.

Spanish performance aside, most people I played the feature to this morning found it to be flawed but acceptable and potentially useful. To my ears, it's a bit like listening to English spoken fairly fluently by a non-native speaker; an accent is evident and the odd word is pronounced incorrectly, but I can clearly understand what's being said. The Amazon rep I spoke to about the device said the company finds people grow accustomed to the voices—you choose either male or female.

Yet no one who heard the feature told me it was even close in quality to the soaring cadences of true audiobooks, which are read by professional actors. Stephen King, who has written a novella exclusively for the Kindle 2, quips that the voices are "GPS-like." But Roy Blount Jr. the president of the Authors Guild, describing the Kindle voices as "quite listenable," has weighed in with concern that writers will be "assailed" by the new feature, because "Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights."

In some ways, this objection echoes similar concerns from creators with past new technologies. For example, the advent of videotape raised fears that overall income would drop as home videos killed the movie theater, and hefty ticket sales were increasingly supplanted by less-lucrative rental fees.

Blount argues that audio rights to Kindle books should be paid as a separate fee, in part because people could forego buying an audiobook version of a title because they can now have the Kindle read it to them.

Perhaps some audiobook sales might be displaced. However, if past history serves, the opposite is just as likely. That is, more people may come to crave professional audio recordings, having discovered the appeal (and limitations) of having books read aloud to them by a software program, and having subsequently discovered the option of having them read aloud to them by a human being—and a professional actor, to boot.

—Paul Reynolds

[Photo: Sudarshan Vijayaraghavan]