Kindle 2: A Possible Drawback for Authors and Their Readers

Getting your novel published on Kindle has lots of attractions. Let's face it, the more ways people can read it the better. The fact that the Kindle also has the "read aloud" feature makes the device not only accessible to people with print impairments, it basically turns a book into an audio book without paying narrators and sound studios.

Unfortunately one unfortunate fact has come to light. We already know that the average audio book reader, meaning the person, not the device, will not likely tolerate the mechanical nature of the text-to-speech voices. Print impaired people are used to it by now. While the books recorded by the National Library Services are professionally narrated, our various speech output applications have about as much resemblance to a human voice as any run-of-the-mill robot.Any authors worrying about the competing with their audio books can relax. It ain't gonna happen.

Now a new problem has come to.. well, not light, but definitely sound. While happily listening to Helen Hollick's splendid Sea Witch on my own Kindle I was dismayed by the pronunciation of the main characters' names: Jessamiah and Tiola. My computer reads them as jess-uh-MY-uh and TEE oh la. That's pretty close to what Hollick intended. But the Kindle 2 reads them as juh SAY me ack and SHY luh! Say what?

I contacted Amazon's Digital Rights people and asked whether the pronunciation of words in the Kindle's dictionary can be edited. The answer was no.

Now if I was as attached to one of my characters as I know Hollick is to Jessamiah (I am, but "Lawrence" and "Shannon" are easy to prounce) I would absolutely refuse to let his name get so mangled and would simply not put the book on the Kindle. This won't be an issue if you, as a novelist, don't care whether the people who prefer or have no choice other than to listen to books read yours. (If the latter is the case, then expect a withering look and n o review from me!) But my educated guess is that the Sea Witch series will never be on Kindle.

Whether the Kindle's makers have any clue about this limitation, I can't say. I personally believe that the "read aloud" feature on it was purely a gimmick to sell a new generation of Kindle. If that's what it is, then hey, I am happy to take advantage as I was with the first talking watches. But I'm with Hollick if, as a result, she never puts her books on their catalog.