Kindle and Copyright

Jessamyn West (2009) has posted on the issue with Kindle and copyright. Apparently Kindle is under some pressure from authors to deactivate the text-to-speech function (TTS) - "standard publishing contracts with most major trade publishers do not permit publishers to sell e-books bundled with audio rights." (The Authors' Guild, 2009) Although there are some ways around this for the print-disabled, what about those who bought a Kindle and subsequently find some of its functionality has been disabled? It's as if authors were allowed to come into our homes and rip pages out of a book they had written. Meredith Filak (2009) makes the point that listening to TTS is very different from listening to a professionally produced audiobook. Whilst I can understand authors not wanting to lose rights I think they have overreacted here.