The point here (I write as a dues paying Authors Guild member) is that Amazon wants to market the audio feature in lieu of audiobooks, and doesn't want to pay authors or publishers for the audio right. It might seem pedantic, pecuniary, or just stupid, but ask your neighborhood published author how little money they make already. Audiobooks are a $1 billion per year business, and that money flows to mid-list and bestselling authors like. Audiobooks have had a huge boost from Internet downloads, making them more likely to be produced and sold than, say, a new paperback edition of the same book.

The Guild, by the way, isn't trying to get Amazon to do anything particular yet. They're suggesting authors review upcoming contracts and make sure they're not giving away audio rights in this fashion by accident. The group simply wants Amazon to pay for rights that Amazon is marketing as being part of the Kindle's featureset. (Oddly, Amazon owns Audible, so they're sort of marketing against themselves.)

This all comes back to the quaint notion that the creator of a work has and should have a variety of rights about how their work is used or transformed. Some authors, like Cory Doctorow, make a fine living in print, and make tons of ancillary rights available free of charge (like public performance or audio versions or even the full text for reproduction online). That's his right.

There's often some confusion about publishers and authors just about like music labels and musicians. Many authors, like many musicians, have signed away so many of their rights to the media firm that produces their work that it appears that that media firm is just another faceless entity grubbing for more money.

Rather, this particular case shows that there are plenty of authors who simply want to be appropriately compensated for each different use of their work by the firm that's making money on selling those rights. Amazon's text-to-speech isn't precisely an audiobook, but it's not precisely not, either.

Recall, too, that the Authors Guild allied with the publisher's association and other forces just got Google to stand down in a huge settlement in which authors and publishers the work of which was scanned and made available without permission will receive per-book compensation. And Google revised its whole books program in a way that both supports the rights of creators and publishers, and provides greater access to the public, academics, and students to work otherwise locked up in print only form.