I haven't had a lot of time to read books since my daughters were born.  When the Kindle version 1 was released by Amazon a few years ago, it was so far under my radar that I had no curiosity about the device at all.  In fact, the only time I ever really heard anything about the Kindle was from techy podcasts I enjoy (GeekBrief.TV, TWIT).

Recently Amazon released their update of the Kindle, version 2, and once again my curiosity was zilch.  Then last week, one day after I got home from work, I had live.twit.tv streaming to my MacBook and all of the sudden Leo Laport was gone from the screen and there was a new, pretty Kindle....reading to me.

Leo had left for lunch and instead of just leaving the cameras on an empty room for all of my fellow nerds, he had the Kindle propped up, turned on the text-to-speech functionality and the Kindle just read.


After seeing that the device was capable of reading books to me, my interest grew.  As a coder (.net, c#) I spend nearly all of my day in front of 3 screens with an iTouch filled with podcasts and punk rock girl bands blasting in my ear.  On occasion, my podcasts run dry, I'm tired of the same punk songs, and Pandora just isn't cutting it...it would sure be nice to fire up a book-like scenario.  

Please note, prior to my discovery of podcasts back when the only people doing it were Dawn and Drew and Adam Curry, I was an Audible subscriber.  I had burned through countless books and only left Audible as a subscriber because of the free content podcasts began to provide me (that and I was poor and couldn't really scrape up the $20 a month for books any longer...still can't, actually).

Now recently, probably thanks to the advertising deal Leo Laport has with Audible and that the ads seem to constantly be in my ear, I have considered going back to Audible for the occasional "now and then" book session but the price?  Not sure....and the Kindle 2 price?  Still not sure.  Plus you have to buy the books individually?  No way!

Today I found out that the folks at Amazon have put out an iPhone app that, in essence, turns your iPhone or iTouch into a Kindle!  This excited me greatly!  I won't have to plop out the ridiculous cost of a Kindle 2 to get Kindle 2 the functionality that I'm interested in, mainly the text-to-speech function.


I installed the app, found a free book on the Kindle website to try things out and after about 5 minutes of trying to figure out how the heck to get the text-to-speech part of the iPhone App to work, became GREATLY DISAPPOINTED that the functionality was NOT THERE in the iPhone App.  It's just flat out not there.

I am never going to buy a Kindle.  I don't read enough books to make it worth the investment.  I am probably not going back to Audible any time soon...same reason.  But for a now-and-then book blast on my iTouch, I would really like Amazon to offer the text-to-speech option for their iPhone app.  That, I'd be willing to pay for.  I'd gladly buy your App Store app for a couple of bucks and be willing to shell out about $10 a book if my iTouch could read the books to me via the application.  Until then, this icon will sit dormant on my iTouch with about 80 other unused icons, spur of the moment freebies that I tried out and never bothered to delete.

Amazon, you're missing the boat.  Enable the text-to-speech functionality of you iPhone app and charge for it.  You could even leave the version you provide for free as the "lite" version.  I'm the idea guy, you're the money men.  Make it happen.

-Corby-