As if we weren't already crazy about Kindle, Amazon came out with Kindle 2 on Monday and it is full of all sorts of extras that the first didn't have. For starters, it's lighter, sleaker, and more modern looking than the original. It holds more books and it has a longer battery life to give you more reading time between charges.
But the really exciting part is that the device comes with Text-to-Speech built in! You can have any part of your Kindle books read back to you by a male or a female in one of three speech rates. We haven't been able to take it for a spin yet, since the new Kindle isn't coming out for another week and a half. I can't wait to try it out and see whether the text to speech will be helpful enough to use constantly or if it is the old, robotic voices that are not useful for reading more than one or two words back.
Could we have competition for other Assistive Technology for reading such as Daisy Players? It's too early to say (Amazon does carry a lot of books, but it is still up to them to make a book available for Kindle), but it is exciting to have such a hugely popular, mainstream product come out that incorporates Assistive Technology.
As a side note, there is some controversy coming out of the text-to-speech announcement for the new Kindle. The Author's Guild is claiming that text-to-speech on Kindle 2 infringes the copyrights on audiobooks. There is a big difference between the voice coming from the Kindle; nobody would argue that it replaces the voice of an author or performer reading a text. Text-to-speech is already available for free with many operating systems, and that hasn't caused any uproar either (yet).
What's your take on it? Are you as excited as I am about the Kindle 2?
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