My point there was that Audio books are a valid and standard product and if the industry can show damages, I was wondering if that would bring a different context to the discussion.

One side of the argument that Amazon might take is that they are simply selling a reader. No different that selling a program that plays music based off of scanning sheet music. From a technical standpoint I'm sure we all see how that defense could be used.

Conversely, the publishing industry treats audio rights to books as a separate and wholly viable product to sell. Amazon sidestepping that and offering a device that produces much the same results is the issue at hand.

If I'm not mistaken, is not one of the yardsticks in these situations the impact? If sales of Kindle 2s and their "free" audio play of books has an impact on the sale of actual AudioBooks, would that not indicate an issue?

So the debate might be shifted to "Will sales of Kindle 2 impact sales of audio books?". In that context it might be easier to understand the relevance of audio rights being given away.

In contracts such as these, I would expect the boilerplate equivalent of "all other rights reserved" to be in the contract.

Amazon must still obtain the source text of the book from the publisher and negotiate some sort of compensation structure with the publisher. I would not expect them to be free to simply scan in existing works and start selling them on the Kindle without a new agreement with the publishers outlining the sales of electronic copies.

So while the author has no contract with Amazon, there is a chain of legal rights for the book itself and additional rights could not typically be inserted without some type of negotiation with someone in that chain.

Like yourself, I am not a lawyer, nor am I an insider of the publishing industry, simply knowing what we have learned by having been through the process ourselves.

Regardless of how this particular argument has been made for this example, there is actually an under riding issue to this.

Authors sign contracts for the use of their works by a publisher. these contracts usually spell out exact restrictions for use of the content. The author's compensation for their work in creating the book is in various ways tied to the rights of use that they sign away with the contract. A publisher who takes a hit novel and wants to produce an audio book version of that book must have the rights to do so. If they do not, then they must strike a new contract with the author to attain these rights.

This is the basic foundation of how authors make money for their work.

The Kindle 2, by making text to speech a foundation part of how the book is sold, while perhaps an interesting idea for some users, may in fact be problematic from a contract standpoint.

While the Kindle 2 today may offer a monotone rendering only marginally better than watching Wargames, but that is a temporary condition. Technology advances and soon these readers might add more flavor to the reading. At what point does the Kindle interfere with the Books on Tape market? These issues must be resolved in order to proceed in an acceptable fashion.

The user of various readers for the visually impaired is an existing reality that has it's own arrangements in place with various publishers, distributors, etc.

To take a special needs argument and apply it as a defense of a device designed for the broad market, is a conceptual fallacy.

It's easy to point at the Author's Guild and make the leap to painting them with the same brush as the MPAA and RIAA but the publishing industry has some significant variations from those industries and to assume that the same motive drive them is foolish.

As an eaxmple. My wife is a new author. She went through nearly 4 months of contract discussions and negotiations during her initial sale of her first trilogy. The rights for the books are spelled out in explicit detail, using portions of the boilerplate contracts from both her agent and her publisher. One aspect of author's contracts is what published language(s) the contract covers and if it covers audiobooks. One cannot reasonably expect authors to give up their contract negotiations for their personal compensation for audio rights to their books simply because the Kindle 2 gives text to speech features, and what advanced form those audio features may have in the future.

So, while you read and debate this topic, avoid painting the topic as specific to one speaker and apply it as an argument on behalf of the authors who produce these works.

The Only Way this Works is if they plan to offer Windows 7 as free software in third world markets to head off outright piracy. Today they have no hope of converting those users to paying users since they initial buy-in is huge. If they offered this limited version for free, to get it onto systems and out there, then charged small incremental fees to add more functionality, they might be able to monetize those markets.

But nothing has changed on the PSP exceopt a few updates. So why did it take this long to get cool stuff? Sony really has been having a hard decade. This sort of thing should have been worked into the initial PSP release and used to increase market share, instead of comming after all this time when the DS is kicking it's butt.