The Author’s Guild, which claims to be “the nation’s leading advocate for writers’ interests in effective copyright protection, fair contracts and free expression” since its founding in 1912, appears to be upset over the text-to-speech feature in Amazon’s upcoming Kindle 2 eBook device.

I can’t locate the press release from the Author’s Guild, but from the news reports I have read (quietly to myself, and not out loud) it appears that the Guild is trying to make the case that reading a book “out loud” violates the copyright owner’s right to exclusively create “derivative works based upon the work.”

I would argue that the text-to-speech feature of the Kindle 2 does not produce a derivitave work, but rather is an alternative way of accessing the material one has already purchased. I would describe it as analagous to, say, plugging in an external monitor to the device in order to see the text more clearly. I would also ask if this feature really impacts the Audio Book market - do people generally buy Audio Books as alternatives to regular text, perhaps for a unique performance experience?