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By David Rothman

image If Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is as progressive as we take her to be, I hope she’ll soon speak up against the DRM-enabled turnoff of text to speech in Kindle editions of her works. E-book and lit blogs need to start raising that issue in a Morrison context. Same for other famous writers.

But meanwhile some people could be suffering besides the sight-impaired: authors and publishers. Why?  Because the TTS turnoff is aimed at e-books, one of the fastest-growing segments of the book business.

image Consider this. Audiobook sales fell 21 percent from $218 milllion in 2007 to $172 million in 2008. By contrast, e-book sales jumped 68 percent from $67 million to $113 million. So here’s the question. Could better e-book tech and a wider range of titles be eating into audiobook sales? And just as importantly, given E’s growth, mightn’t Random House and others actually hurt themselves and their authors by turning off text to speech in the cases of at least some Kindle books? Questions like those emerge directly or indirectly in an iReader post based on AAP stats, and I think it’s on target.

Here’s one angle. More and more Americans will be vision-impaired as the Baby Boomers age. So in shutting off TTS, writers and publishers aren’t just setting back their PR. They may be inflicting some nasty damage to earnings from e-books that the sight-impaired might otherwise be buying.

 
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