Authors Guild responds to protest by Reading Rights Coalition over attempt to mute Amazon's Kindle 2 e-reader

Here’s the opening paragraph in a statement from the Authors Guild in response to a protest held yesterday afternoon in New York City by the Reading Rights Coalition, a nonprofit organization that represents millions of disabled people who cannot read print, over the Authors Guild’s attempt to mute the text-to-speech function in Amazon’s new Kindle 2 e-reader:

“April 7, 2009. Today, the National Federation of the Blind led a protest in front of the Guild's offices in Manhattan. This protest stems from Amazon's announcement in February that it would allow publishers to disable the voice-output feature of its Kindle 2 after we had objected that the feature threatened audio markets, violated authors' copyrights and exceeded the e-rights licenses that authors granted publishers. ..."

Read the entire statement from the Authors Guild.