Blount is the president of the US Authors Guild, and last week wrote an opinion column for the New York Times entitled The Kindle Swindle? Blount argued that the new Read-To-Me feature of Amazon’s latest eBook reader was akin to the end of mankind as we know it; a computerised text-synthesiser that was going to leave the audio book industry as burnt out as a carelessly parked Porsche on a South London council estate. 

“You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading Harry Potter or of authors, ahem, reading themselves,” Blount argued.  ”But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.” 

No, they’re not. Go to the Amazon Kindle 2 Page, click on the top video and listen for yourself. It sounds like a Dalek that’s been sent on media training. And note that Amazon only lets the speech synthesiser ramble for a sentence or so – probably just before it horribly mispronounced Mr Darcey as “Mister Darkie” and  sparked an international race-relations incident. 

There’s a reason publishers pay actors such as Stephen Fry, Martin Jarvis and Rob Brydon a healthy wedge to narrate their books – and that’s because no-one wants to listen to Davros reading War and Peace. With the best will in the world, even Stephen Hawking got a narrator in for the audio book of A Brief History Time.

Nevertheless, Amazon has buckled and is now letting publishers decide which novels they wish to be read aloud by the Kindle. 

Read my lips, Mr Blount. G-E-T-A-L-I-F-E.