The Kindle’s text-to-speech capability surprised me by being much better than I imagined it would be. And everyone should expect that in the next few years computer voices will become indistinguishable from human voices (acoustically if not theatrically). The Authors Guild does.

They’re worried that Amazon’s newest e-book device has the potential to undermine the market for audio books. They’re right—it is a threat and audio book publishers should take note. But illegal?

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

What next? Sorry, kids, I can’t read you a bedtime story—go buy your own copy. It doesn’t seem like the Guild have been paying attention to what happened to the music industry.

Hey, Authors Guild! Want to protect the audio book business? Here’s how: make better audio books. Hire talented voice actors, make high quality recordings, sell at a fair price, and ditch the DRM that assumes every customer is a thief. I can’t believe those guys are actually talking about adding more DRM to prevent text-to-speech. Doomed, I tell you.