Kindle Textbook Runs Into Trouble With Text to Speech for Blind

Posted on November 13, 2009

Amazon.com did not get the reception it was hoping for from universities that were testing out the large-format Kindle DX as an electronic textbook replacement. The universities don't like the fact that the device doesn't have text-to-speech capabilities for blind students, as promised. But Amazon.com ran in to trouble with the Authors Guild when it tried to implement text to speech features.

Sadly, the text-to-speech abilities of the Kindle were crippled shortly after launch following complaints from the Authors' Guild of America that the text-to-speech functionality in the Kindle 2 -- which promised to bring the benefits of electronic books to blind and partially sighted people -- were infringing authors' rights to be paid a separate royalty for all verbal performances of their works.
This disagreement -- which saw Amazon head off a lawsuit by making the text-to-speech capability controllable by e-book publishers via a flag which disables the functionality -- is directly responsible for the DX's main failings, at least according to the director of libraries at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Ken Frazier: "the big disappointment [in the trials] was learning that the Kindle DX is not accessible to the blind. Advancements in text-to-speech technology have created a market opportunity for an e-book reading device that is fully accessible for everyone, [but] this version of the Kindle e-book reader missed the mark."
Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, is even more scathing in his disdain for the device: in a statement regarding the use of the Kindle DX in education as a replacement for traditional textbooks, Dr. Maurer states that "it is our position that no university should consider this device [the Kindle DX] to be a viable e-book solution for its students."

Amazon.com is in a no win situation on this one. It seems that the National Federation of the Blind and the Authors' Guild are the parties that should be talking and trying to work this out. Because electronic textbooks really are the way to go: textbooks are heavy, expensive and are very wasteful. Electronic textbooks save old growth forests and are easily updated.