Swirls of controversy surround the Amazon ebook reader Kindle 2's text-to-speech synthesis feature. Except, most of this brouhaha is generated by Slashdot's army of Amazon-is-always-right footsoldiers led by Technology-can-do-no-wrong weekend warriors.

Most, if not all, miss this part of the argument--it isn't the publishers versus Amazon at all! It's the content producers versus the content distributors.

I'm going to leave the issue of whether a computer-generated audio rendering of a text is a "derivative work" to the lawyers. I'm instead going to focus on the point of view of the actual content creators (also known as authors).

Audio books make up a huge portion of the book market and that market share is growing multiplicatively year-over-year. But ebooks represent a sliver of the overall market. Mix the ability to generate an audio book on-the-fly with the pittance given to an author for her ebook with the time and effort it takes dozens of people to generate a legitimate audio book (let alone the original text, which can take decades), and you have theft.

Here's another slant (yes, slant(!)) that misses the point: ebooks are not plain-text books--they are DRM-encoded derivative works created by the publishers for a sliver of the cost of production, marketing, and distribution combined, and authors, in fact, do not get paid in full--authors get what's known as, yes, shutdown, it's called royalties.

As for the followup post's argument that the author gets the copyright holder's rights, I can only say the following: anyone, no matter how absolutely perfect the manuscript, who submits it to a publisher with a copyright attached, will be laughed out of the business. Copyright attaches, in publishing, upon the agreement to publish, and it is held not by the author but by the publisher.

I recommend reading the Engadget Interview with Authors' Guild Exec. Director Paul Aiken to the legion on Slashdot who have no better ability to debate than to toss around the tired 'STFU' meme.

In other Kindle-related paranoia, Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate that the device is going to make Amazon the ebook equivalent of Apple's iTunes Store in its market dominance. He couldn't have missed the point farther. Total 180 from reality.

Will the Kindle increase sales of eBooks? We'll see. Will it lock the entire publishing industry into a DRM tarpit and sink it? No.

Here's why. Every industry learned from what the iTunes DRM system did to music vis a vis piracy. Every industry learned it well. Are publishers, the most change-wary of all, going to allow themselves to be handcuffed by a DRM scheme they themselves can't control? Get serious.

In the mean time?

Oh, I don't know, read a book?

init

As a technologist (whatever that term means), you'd think this little computer geek would have jumped on Web 2.0 the second it started in Beta. But that was not the case.

It took massive boredom for me to get a PSP. That's really what started my rapid spiral. First, it was hacking the damned thing to boot ISO's.

Next, it was figuring out how to get YUM working and the like.

And now, here I am, posting on a blog, going through Google's P icasa, Beta testng Windows 7 (I'm sending way too many bug reports, so I'm going to move that off of my production server (yes, I'm a webguru)). I'm in the process right now of setting up every piece of tech I need or ever think I might need.

That, and I'm getting WinXPLite rev 09 up and running in a production environment, more secure than the proverbial analogy to a US gold repository.

Oh, and did I mention I've got a manuscript to finish all while I've my GUI on my laptop crashing every five minutes?

GAH!