And I have to applaud Cory for going after Amazon’s stance of forced DRM. It’s clear that Amazon isn’t interested in expanding the market for electronic media (which may help drive their business) and concerned only with building its own market which doesn’t play well with others.

(It may also be interesting to note that Cory won’t accept donations for his freely-available books because he doesn’t wish to cut his publisher out of the loop.)

“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.”

I’ve been watching Amazon chucking their weight around for some time now, and do believe this time they may have gone too far. Suppose this read-aloud feature is the subject of a court case, which they lose — by then they’ll have shipped an awful lot of Kindles Mk 2.0. Will they have to recall them? What if owners don’t play along and refuse to send them back? If some unmodified Kindles remain out there with the read-aloud feature intact, will the owners be in contempt of court if they use it? Or will Amazon be in contempt for continuing to sell them fresh e-books?

Generally I’m in favour of anything that promotes e-reading, but I don’t include in that some of Amazon’s tactics.