The Week in Your Words: Kindle 2 gagged at birth

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 6 Mar 2009 at 15:54

In a week that saw the Kindle silenced, Wi-Fi take flight, and Ofcom bow to BT once again, we take a look back to see what you've been saying.

Amazon to fit Kindle 2 with silencer

An open letter to Roy Blount Jr, president of the Author's Guild.

Dear Mr Jr.

We at PC Pro wholeheartedly support your belief that Kindle's text-to-speech feature is a "significant challenge to the publishing industry". As children we dreamed of having our bedtime stories read to us by Stephen Hawking, and of hearing the Dalek rendition of Tale of Two Cities.

While Stephen Fry and his studio-quality recitation of the Harry Potter novels was superb, we would have preferred the computerised voice of the Kindle - each syllable slipping across the ear like a cheese grater. We doubt we are alone in this and can only imagine the devastation that offering such aural pleasure for free would bring to the publishing world.

Yours,

PC Pro

Ahem. Of course, not everybody on the forums shares PC Pro's voice-box fetish.

"These publishers are as delusional about the sustainability of their business model as the RIAA and MPAA are of theirs," notes smartguy1 sagely. "They're clinging to an outdated concept of what people want, and are ready to sue to that end. The sad thing is they will be the ones to lose over this."

Amnesia10 disagreed: "This is naughty of Amazon. I cannot see why royalties should not be paid if they are listening to the book rather than reading it. Though if I want an audio book I would prefer a spoken word version over a computerised voice."

JJW009 disagreed with this disagreement: "Surely the royalties on the eBook are being paid... expecting double royalties just because a book is read aloud rather than read quietly seems ridiculous. If I read a book to my partially sighted grandmother, should I pay additional royalties?"

Depends if you're Stephen Fry we suppose.

Flying robots to provide Wi-Fi in disaster zones

Has nobody seen The Terminator? If disaster ever does strike this island nation of ours the last thing we want to see are robots swooping in over the horizon to finish the job. Especially if instead of rendering medical aid, or digging our broken body out of the rubble, they instead proceed to lay down a Wi-Fi network so that our last act on this earth is to decline that sociopathic school friend on Facebook for the 300th time.

Thankfully, cheysuli found a way of making this useful: "Would it do any good to declare rural Britain a disaster zone? Well it's one way of getting broadband..."

Cunning, but jamesyld spotted a problem: "Unfortunately the UK can only afford paper aeroplanes to launch the transmitters. Although there is hope of an increase in the budget to get some cardboard, which should mean longer flight times."

We're afraid health and safety precludes the mass creation of paper aeroplanes due to the constant threats of paper cuts. Sorry. Even this wasn't low-tech enough for Noghar.

"A Wi-Fi network that is only up for 20 minutes won't be a lot of use. I would have thought using Wi-Fi relays attached to tethered balloons would be just as effective and a lot less hard on fuel."