I am really irritated with Amazon and the Kindle,

As an extremely busy CEO who loves to read but has precious little down time, I use technology to help. Though a devout paper lover – the smell of a newly opened hard covered book is divine – I supplement with technology rather than read less. I therefore owned a Rocket Book – one of the first E readers – which allowed me to travel with numerous texts sans weight, and now I  use a kindle, ipad and ipod to read everywhere.

In Los Angeles – this means the car! Hours of traffic and freeways available to a readaholic. To that end I listen to Audible.com books as well as Kindle books through the text to speech option. There is a difference – the former is a performance, sometimes with actors and music, the latter is a computer reading in a monotone. It is impossible to confuse the two. Yet – amazingly, Amazon is allowing publishers to disable the text to speech feature as they feel their Audible.com sales could be threatened.

Nonsense – by that logic I couldn’t have the passenger in the car read a book to me,  read to my kids or read to the visiually challenged. This is stupid, not legally necessary –  yet – Amazon caved to this silly demand.

Really – Amazon needs to grow a pair and support the text to speech option it promised consumers.