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But Amazon is neither selling nor giving away audio books. They are giving away a general text-to-speech solution which may conveniently be used on a book. Arguing that this is violating copyrights is the same thing as saying that text-to-speech is inherently illegal.

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I wonder how things would change if the text-to-speech were done server-side? I'd imagine one can get significantly better quality if you're not doing text-to-speech on the 400Mhz processor on the Kindle 2.

The issue there is the bandwidth required for streaming audio. This is a device set up for batch downloads and not much else -- when you add time-sensitive network requirements like this, you make customers unhappy.

Also, what if you're using it as a "book on tape" in the car, on a road trip through the middle of nowhere? You lose network connection, you lose your book on tape.

tldr: I think it would be better quality, when you could get it, but at some level reliability is more important for this application.

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