So Amazon is backing off text-to-speech.

I recorded this podcast before I saw the news, finishing up the first round of editing literally seconds before. But hopefully this podcast—which is fortunately now legal, because had I recorded it in the future, it would have been illegal—will still be informative for those who wonder what Kindle’s text-to-speech is like, and why you should buy audiobooks anyways.

(Note: audiobooks are not available for every book. Because it takes so much effort to make a good one. So the loss of Kindle’s text-to-speech has really screwed the pooch for those of us who can see well enough to use a Kindle’s menus and suchlike, but not well enough to read for long periods of time.)

And now, coming in at around 10 minutes, the podcast.

ETA: The book being read is Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!).

http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/flash/dewplayer.swf?mp3=&showtime=1

Kindle: Text to Speech Demo [Download]