First of all, I've read the Times nearly my whole life. I grew up in a NY-suburban Times household. I have fond memories of my father spreading out the Sunday edition on the floor, sitting on the carpet in his pajamas. He read that paper every day until he died. (No evidence that the Times hastened his death.)

But that's not reason enough to fork over $15 bucks a month for the latest digital format.

The NYTimes web site is persistently in my "most visited" lineup on my computers. I have multiple Times RSS feeds neatly sorted in Google Reader. I subscribe to the Times on my Kindle. Oops ... as of five minutes ago, not so much with the Kindle. I ditched that subscription, and replaced it with TimesReader 2.0.

In doing so, I violated my own dictum (and we all know how much that hurts) that convenience always trumps quality. The Kindle subscription takes the convenience prize, especially when traveling. But oh my -- the quality of that interface would leave Samuel Pepys aghast. Fun fact about Pepys: he had 10 brothers and sisters. He had to fight for his share of the family Kindle.

Dictum death occurs when quality zooms upward, but convenience gets nudged down just a little. That's what happened here. Bad news for Amazon. I'm suddenly willing to dig out my laptop on a plane for a vastly improved reading experience plus updates from just before the machine exited WiFi range. I used to keep the Kindle on my bedside table so I could start reading the OpEd page in the morning before my eyes were fully open. Now I'll haul over a laptop. We'll see how that goes, but at the moment, the tradeoff seems more than worth it for the full-color, wide-angle experience.

Is any of this reason enough to subscribe in any fashion, when I spend all day and half the night in front of computer screens and can get Times content free of charge? I just hope my wife doesn't start asking that question. In the meantime, I am loving this thing. The NYTimes might and might not survive the newspaper crash, but some of the digital solutions it comes up with definitely rock.

In a victory for neo-Luddites the Author's Guild, Amazon has announced its intention to disable the speech to text function its new Kindle 2 ebook reader. Amazon announced its intention to selectively disable the device following criticism from the Author's Guild President Roy Blount Jnr. that the Kindle 2 would undermine the billion dollar a year audiobook market.

In a statement released to the press, Amazon argued that the text-to-speech feature was legal, but said that it would give authors the right to decide whether or not to disable the feature for their books:

'Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given... nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat... Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rights holders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title.'

It's unclear if the Author's Guild plans to now campaign to receive royalties from all other text-to-speech programs, but its hollow victory is sure to be received poorly by the visually impaired and any other consumers who are forking out around $350 bucks for their new Kindle and want to actually use the legal functionality that it has been designed with.

Hopefully Amazon will flag up which cheapskate publishers have disabled the text to speech functionality of their books very clearly, so that Kindle users can be sure to vote with their wallets and boycott those responsible for this shameful decision.

[Via the New York Times]

The latest version of Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle 2, has been attracting plenty of positive attention for its slimline form, style and functionality but has also drawn criticism from an unexpected quarter - from Authors Guild President and humorist, Roy Blount Jr, who isn't amused about the Kindle's new text to speech functionality.

The Kindle 2 has a function that allows published works that are downloaded onto the device to be converted into speech and played back through the small speakers in the device in either a male or female voice, functionality that will no doubt be attractive to the visually impaired, drivers on long trips or for people who are simply too damn lazy to read the book themselves.

The Authors Guild is in a tizzy because it feels that the Kindle 2 is going to undermine the billion dollar a year audiobook market. Blount apparently wasn't joking when he wrote in a New York Times editorial this week that 'authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2's version of books'.