BWOTAE » kindle http://www.bwotae.com Big Waste of Time and Energy Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:55:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Amazon Gives, Let’s Random House Take It Back http://www.bwotae.com/2009/05/15/amazon-gives-lets-random-house-take-it-back/ http://www.bwotae.com/2009/05/15/amazon-gives-lets-random-house-take-it-back/#comments Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:22 +0000 ray http://www.bwotae.com/?p=150 It looks like Amazon (at the behest of Random House) has begun to disable the text to speech feature in some Kindle books after they’ve already been purchased. I have to admit I don’t use text to speech and it’s not a key reason I bought the Kindle, yet this bothers me a lot. It just shows that in DRM world we don’t own anything and the big companies can change things on a whim, even if we think we bought it. It would be one thing if they disabled the feature on new purchases (and said it was disabled up front) but they’ve disabled it for people who bought that functionality when they bought the book.

Test to speech (TtS) has been around on computers for a long time and it’s not much different on the Kindle. I also listen to audion books a lot (although a lot less now) and wouldn’t consider the Kindle TtS as a alternative. The only thing I’d envision TtS for is to finish a chapter or article if I have to run out of the house before I finish. I’ve done that exactly never.

Random House is too big for me to say I’ll never buy another one of their books (if I could even keep track of all their imprints), but I will certainly think twice before buying (in reality renting) one of their books.

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