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.

In unrelated news, the Netflix version of the Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds concert is the 2D version despite the fact that they are clearly showing the 3D version of the DVD cover on their site. Boo. Hey, Netflix, there’s a little girl in this house who was pretty bummed out by that.

We finally were able to see The Dark Knight. Very satisfying. It didn’t quite have the impact of the the first one, probably only because my expectations for Begins were so low and my expectations for Dark Knight were so high. The cell-phone/sonar thing with the glowy bat eyes? Hokey. And can’t they use a mask that doesn’t make him sound like he’s got a head cold? But I forgive them. It was a great movie.

Speaking of comic book characters, they showed the Watchmen trailer. It looked cool and all but I think it probably left most of the audience—that is, the majority who never heard of Watchmen before—scratching their heads. I’ve never been a huge fan of comic books or graphic novels, but being a geek and an avid science fiction reader, it was impossible for me never to have at least heard of Watchmen. I decided to pick up a copy and read it through before the movie comes out. I’m on chapter three. It’s good so far. But I predict total disaster for the movie in that it will be impossible for a two hour PG-13 movie to be faithful to the book. You know, in the same kind of way that I, Robot (the movie) was a total, tragic, epic disaster.

The Girl is having trouble sleeping. The neighbor’s dog is barking beneath her window. She’s reading and drawing with the light on. I’ll check on her in a few minutes and tuck her in and slide the paper out from under her arm and admire her drawings and put her pencil away and quietly, quietly turn off the light.

From The Boy’s room, a gentle murmur. I stand where he cannot see me, just beyond the light outside his door, and listen. And my heart swells with pride. He is reading.

Read the rest of this entry over at The Blogfathers…