I myself think that Amazon probably wanted to push people to Audible books and more expensive gizmos–in my opinion, far more of a factor than the publishers.
Luckily Amazon is not totally “discontinuing TTS.” The voice in my Fire HD is better than the ones in my older Kindle Keyboard.

NIck, I really appreciate your interest in the issue, and, yes, if certain publishers keep warring against TTS, then a full legislative or legal remedy would certainly be in order. Amazon didn’t really bother to defend TTS to the extent it should have–I wasn’t happy with the “switch off” compromise. I’d love to see Amazon and groups like NFB counter the copyright zealots and encourage Washington to clarify TTS’s status as a basic right for readers in the U.S. (same for in the case of other countries). Audio books could still exist, read by skilled human narrators and augmented with author interviews and the like.

David

Glad to see the TTS part since it is more of a problem with publishers than a problem with vendors (in this case, Amazon).

I dit a lot of research on this topic a few months ago and guess what… copyrights involved!
Apparently, publishers were very angry about TTS, considering it as something that the e-book license doesn’t include. So they threatened Amazon blah blah blah. As a consequence, Amazon provided with a killswitch so that angry publishers could disable TTS. And it seems a lot of them disabled TTS. That is one of the reason why Amazon is discontinuing TTS today.

TTS is all about accessibility but some publishers don’t care. They consider it is something vendors can’t do and people must pay for this feature, for each book.
I guess the only thing people can do is turning to publishers and express themselves on this particular issue. Maybe a class action so that they can discover some people are handicapped in the real world?

* A richer feature set. Yes, I’m not sure I’ll use all the iPad features I paid for, but what I’ve paid for them is less than I’d pay for them as add-ons–and that’s assuming I can add on. In most cases with smartphones and tablets and unlike desktop computers, what you don’t get is what you’ll never get. I’ve got TTS in all sorts of apps (i.e. Instapaper) since it is part of iOS. Now I hear that if I’d bought a Fire, I’d never get it even for Amazon’s Kindle ebooks. Bad!

* Upgrades. Other than Apple, no one in the industry seems to be supporting mobile OS upgrades or adding new features (i.e. no TTS for the first Fire). My iPhone 3GS shipped with iOS 3.0. This week it’ll be getting a free upgrade to iOS 6.0. Yes, I won’t get all the features those who own an iPhone 6 will get, but I’ll get the ones that’ll work well with that now-ancient CPU. And my iPad will now have Sirl, something it didn’t ship with. Apple, for all its faults, continues to add value to what we’ve bought for several years. Everyone else–including Amazon–seems to expect us to get a new gadget to get new features and even a OS upgrade.

* Bigger often means better. The sheer number of apps used to be a reason to go with Windows rather than Macs. Now the advantage lies with Apple’s mobile devices. With 70% of the market and one of the smallest set of devices in the industry, there’s a lot of reasons for developers to focus first and foremost on iOS. I got that iPad because Scrivener is coming to it late this year or early next year. Who knows if it will ever come to the messy Android platform or, if it does, if an Android device I might get (out of dozens) will run it?

The key thing with Apple is to avoid enhancements. If you can manage fine with their low-end device, you’re not paying that much above the market price. Where you get dunned is for wanting just a little bit more. I got a 16 GB iPad. If I’d moved up to 32 GBs, I’d have paid an additional $100 and there’s no way a mere 16GB of flash memory is worth that much.

Yeah, I’m ticked off that Apple seems to be suing every other high-tech company on the planet. I don’t care what a tablet looks like and I want iOS, Android, and even Windows Mobile devices to have a very similar UI so the learning curve for each is small.

And yeah, I think the text services that Apple packages with OS X and that limit what most third-party text apps can do stink. I waste a lot of time every day because OS X’s spell checker offers so few recommendation for misspelled words. Get one letter wrong, and it often seems clueless. And for all the zeal Apple displays to keep their video and music codexes state of the art, OS X seems to think WordStar circa 1982 was the last word in text handling. No named styles, for instance, even though Word included that about 1988. And while iCloud will allow me to share documents with my other devices, there’s no way other than email (circa 1970s) to send documents to a colleagues’s devices.

And why doesn’t Apple build in a system-wide and application-independent scheme for marking up typos in documents? Those of us who work for a living, as opposed to being dancing shadows in iTunes commercials, spend a lot of time hand editing corrections. That one new feature would put Macs a million miles ahead of Windows in labor/time saving.

Maybe petitioning Amazon to add this features will work. But my impression is that Amazon is as eager to own the bottom, minimal, low-cost end of the market as Apple is to own the feature-rich high end. As long as one gadget in their line does TTS to attract those buyers, Amazon has little interest in adding TTS to the rest.

We won’t get far asking why Amazon isn’t more like Apple. From a marketing perspective, it makes little sense for either Apple or Amazon to compete directly. Each would rather stay in its niche than go toe-to-toe with the other.