Episode 11 - The Authors Guild Is Mad at the Amazon

Amazon.com that is.

With the release of the Kindle 2, the Authors Guild of the USA came out against the text to speech capability of the new kindle. Their "reasoning" is that this capability violates copyright. Yeah, that's right, a computer type voice will stop the sales of audio books. Odd that Amazon would do such a thing, what with them owning audible.com. There is an alternate hypothesis, and that is that it will help the sale of audio books, and that getting content available to people, say oh like blind people (like me) might actually be a good thing. Oh those crazy authors...

We officially welcomed Robin Isard to the show as our third TCer. Both Robin and Ken went to library school and are librarians here at Algoma University, they actually quite like books. (Note the understatement). They got all excited about handling medieval manuscripts, which I would too if I had ever done it.

We talked about the death of paper, and books, and how on Star Trek the captains always seem to like actual books. That led us into a series of Shakespeare references in Star Trek which Isabelle and Madeleine thought quite funny and (hopefully) cute.

We also talked about self publishing, such as Tom Merrit's Boiling Point (which is a really good book) and my friend Dave's book on getting in to grad school.

Welcome Robin, and we welcome your comments. Oh and thanks to Craig and Christian for the Scotch.

Enjoy episode 11.