Climbing K2

My Kindle2 came in the mail yesterday (27 Feb.), just one day after Daniel's Amazon Prime account got his delivered. Not too bad!
I was shaking in delight and the mailman teasingly almost didn't hand it to me because he could see how anxious I was (I was on my way back to work when I saw that the mailboxes on the opposite side of the street had their flags down) and we all know what bastards the Post Office turns people into. The nice FedEx lady delivered one of my Harry Potter books on a Saturday morning and just beamed because she was making so many people happy that day.
In my excitement, I am pinning people down and showing it to them. It's not like the cell phone I'm ashamed to admit I have, this is cool. I tell people I got it for my husband who I believe doesn't read as much as he used to because his vision has gotten very poor. He'll be lucky to even smell it.
Anyway, I'm still all crazy about this gizmo and then I read Roy Blount Jr.'s op/ed in the New York Times about how the audio function of the K2 is ripping off authors ... or has the potential for same.
I have yet to listen to a book read by the K2 because I didn't buy it to listen to it. I'm here for the e-paper. The audio function may be yards better than the computer-generated reading done on the Gutenberg Project books, but when you get down to it, you don't buy the audiobooks just to hear someone drone through the book. You (or rather, I) buy them for the performance. Jim Dale brought Harry Potter to life for millions. Stephen Briggs is currently making Terry Pratchett's Discworld come to life. When I went to the Kindle Store, I looked at the Discworld books that I love so much ... and eventually rejected them because I already own both book and audiobook forms of most of them. And if I want to hear them read, I want Nigel Planer or Briggs (or even Tony Robinson who does a brilliant job with the unfortunately abridged versions) read them, not some computer. I want a performance, and that's what an audio-book is.
Where else can I listen to these Kindle-reads? Plug them into the car audio system for long trips? With one of those droning voices? I don't think so. On an airplane? What? Do I look like I have noise-cancellation headphones?!
No, the audio function on the K2 is a toy, a gadget. I bought the K2 for the e-paper. I enjoy reading. I can see using the audio function only if my eyes wear plum-out.
I'm glad that (the ordinarily cuddly) Mr. Blount is looking after his fellow authors and he's right to bring this to our attention, but it's just a sales gimmick, not a threat to audio rights. It can't be sold separately from the text. It's ephemeral and, let's face it, not that great. You should have heard the Gutenberg audio try to come to grips with the broad Yorkshire accents in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Any human could have done a better job with one lip tied behind their back. Of course, after a while even I managed to get into the story and ignore the hideous struggles with apostrophes.
Before I could finish this post (currently 28 February), Amazon.com seems to have balked. Sigh, just when I think I'm finally ahead of the curve! They will apparently leave it up to the author to allow or disallow this function on each book. Boy, that was fast! I would have thought that the lawyers would have worked all that out in advance, but apparently not - or else one side did not think far enough ahead while the other cagily did. Hmmmm.
A friend has pointed out that this audio function is no different that the book's purchaser reading it aloud. Good gravy, I hope I can read better than that!
I have since listened to the audio on the Kindle ... and it's no better than the Gutenberg reader. My favorite bit was rendering the Ms. (as in Ms. Smith) as "Millisecond Smith." This was from a book currently in print.
I now listen to the text-to-speech partly for the hilarity of these mistakes and partly because I get so into the material that when the time comes to drive somewhere, an appointment or something, I can't give up reading and I don't have to! I just turn on the text-to-read while I'm driving! You know, Mr. Blount, I'd never have discovered the joy of this function if you hadn't brought it to my attention.