From music to movies and now books, the new world of electronic distribution — authorized or not — of creative product continues to challenge both creators, who understandably want to retain as many of their rights as they can, and consumers, who understandably want to enjoy the products they’ve purchased as fully as possible.

Amazon’s just released Kindle 2 is the latest battleground. The Authors Guild has been objecting to the device’s text-to-speech capability, claiming that it infringes on their audiobook rights.

It’s a bit of a mystery why the Guild waited until the device was released to raise their objection, since the features of the Kindle 2 had been widely publicized long before the device was available. But that was its game, and it has paid off: Amazon has backed down.

As The New York Times reported over the weekend, “Amazon Backs Off Text-to-Speech Feature in Kindle”:

Amazon announced today that it will let publishers decide whether they want the new Kindle e-book device to read their books aloud.

The Times also noted that Amazon, even as it gave in to the Guild, remained adamant on the legality of the Kinde’s text-to-speech:

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.

Kindle owners — particularly those who snatched up a Kindle 2 specifically for its text-to-speech capability — are pisssed. As one commenter at Times asked:

What difference does it make if I read it, or have the computer read it to me?

And that’s an excellent question. Clearly a computer-generated voice is no competition for a professionally produced audiobook — many of which are read by professional actors and are as much a performance as a reading. Just as clearly — as Guild president Roy Blount Jr. made clear in his published complaint about the Kindle — people reading books aloud to one another does not violate any rights of authors. Blount argues that while computer voices may not yet be particularly pleasing to the ear — I certainly would not want to listen to any entire novel read by a voice that doesn’t understand what it’s reading — they will eventually get better. But if they do, then the computer-generated voice is only more like one person to reading to another. Which Blount agrees is not something the Guild is worried about.

So what’s the problem?

Of course authors — and all creators of material that is easily distributed electronically, such as music and movies — deserve to be fairly compensated for their work. But this seems like a nonissue… and I say that as both an author myself as well as a publishing professional.