Digital Lifestyle

I know, my Sony will do that too. All the more inexplicable. Apparently it's been an issue ever since the Kindle 1. You used to be able to fake categorization by putting some stuff on a memory card, but the Kindle 2 has no memory card. Mind-bogglingly stupid. Up to 1500 books, flat organization, sort by author, date purchased, or most recently read, view ten at a time. Let's hope your book isn't #732...

Screw you, spineless wimps. This was a major reason that I bought the Kindle 2. I expect a god damn portion of my purchase cost refunded. A substantial portion.

Well, I think you have a good point.

>Well, I think you have a good point.

To paraphrase the (original) Gay Blade: "Indeed. It is hard to find a hat that fits it."

I'm thinking that speech to text and text to speech would be the killer app on the iPhone. read me my new emails, etc.

That's one of the areas that Windows Mobile is better.

If I had a Bluetooth Headset on I could tap the button and say something like, "What was my last missed call?" or, "What is my next appointment?" and it would read back the answer.

Thanks for contacting Amazon.com, and we appreciate you taking the time to send us your comments about this issue.

I’m very sorry for any inconvenience this situation may have caused.

We've looked carefully at the legality of Kindle 2's Text-to-Speech software, and it is clearly legal.

Nevertheless, we believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat. With text-to-speech, Kindle can still read every newspaper, magazine, blog and book out loud to you, except if the book is disabled by the rights holder. We believe most rights holders, usually the publisher or author, will decide to keep text-to-speech enabled.

At Amazon.com, we're passionate about the future and the possibilities that embracing technology can bring to authors and rights-holders everywhere. With Kindle, we continue to focus on bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.

Thank you again for contacting Amazon.com.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

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Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,

Rakesh Pakarla.
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
http://www.amazon.com/your-account

Translation: "Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company " puts its suppliers' comfort above the interests of their customers, and is willing to remove advertised features from their products as needed to keep the suppliers happy.

Needs more Steve.

I mean, JOBS-UP, man!

Use some power to persuade the rights holders. Kick them in the teeth!

Most of the same Apple == DRM whiners are silent on this round.

The American blind association should sue Amazon and the Author's guild for discriminating against them.

Alternatively, just sue every single "rights holder" that opts to disable text-to-speech for their work. Why should people with visual impairments be limited to (the more expensive) audiobooks?

The funny thing is that the legal issues around text-to-speech always run up against the fact that it is generally accepted as legal for a human to read a book aloud to another. They have to worry about being portrayed as trying to prevent parents reading bedtime stories to their children. Which, by logical extension, is what they are trying to do.

Amazon could fight this and win, but they obviously don't feel that they can afford to alienate their suppliers. Customer-centric, my ass.

They don't currently enjoy the same ubiquity as the iPod. They can't afford to piss off the suppliers... yet.

Fortunately, they CAN piss off Kindle early adopters.

Hmm. I need to decide if I'm going to stay with the Sony or go with a Kindle now. Kindle books are cheaper than Sony books and being able to read them on the iPhone as well is a somewhat attractive option.

So, now there's an iPhone Kindle App?

And it's kinda Klunky and crippled?

Morg "Never would'a thunk it..." anti

Can't say enough good things about iMovie's stabilization feature. I've done a whole basketball game with handheld, zoom, and it stabilizes beautifully. Takes hours to calculate, but in the end it's worth it.

I had two renderings of 7+ hours die, though on some of the Version 7 themes - too complex for it it seems.

okay, so my grad program's prereq of java was changed to python. i have to return the java textbook that johnny k helpfully recommended but aside from that... looking at just the "hello world" examples of

#include

void main()
{
cout << "Hello, world." << endl;
}

in C++ and

print "Hello, World!"

in python, i'm already feeling good about the change.

ddt

I think Print "hello world"

also worked on TRS-80s.

yeah, i know! it looks pretty basic so far... .

ddt