It took until Feb­ru­ary 26, but I final­ly got my back­o­rdered x‑mas present — the Kin­dle 2 (check it out here). There’s a lot to like about it. It’s thin & light. The screen is very read­able. It holds a ton of books (1500). It down­loaded War & Peace in a mat­ter of sec­onds. The bat­tery life is long. And as for the oth­er good stuff, you can read Wal­ter Moss­berg’s review in The Wall Street Jour­nal.

But noth­ing is per­fect, and I’m under­whelmed by the Kindle’s new text-to-audio func­tion­al­i­ty, which the­o­ret­i­cal­ly turns any book into an instant audio book. The com­put­er­ized voice is rather painful to lis­ten to. The rhythms and into­na­tions are off. The sub­tleties of the human voice just aren’t there.  I doubt that this func­tion­al­i­ty will get much use. But it is not stop­ping the Authors Guild from com­plain­ing.

Ear­li­er this week, Roy Blount Jr., the Guild’s pres­i­dent, wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes (“The Kin­dle Swin­dle”) ques­tion­ing the legal­i­ty of the new fea­ture, and com­plain­ing that it deprives authors of rev­enue from audio book rights. Per­haps some day, when this tech­nol­o­gy dra­mat­i­cal­ly improves, Blount may have a point. But, for now, the Kin­dle does­n’t plau­si­bly pose much threat to com­mer­cial­ly-sold audio books. Indeed, you only need to remem­ber that Ama­zon bought Audi­ble, the largest provider of com­mer­cial audio books in the US, and has already inte­grat­ed Audi­ble into the Kin­dle. (Thanks Gideon for point­ing that out.) Is Ama­zon going to let text-to-voice under­mine its Audi­ble invest­ment? Not a chance. In the mean­time, I should note that you can test out Audi­ble’s ser­vice and down­load two free audio books along the way. Not a bad deal.