I'm no businessman, much less a lawyer, but I can see a couple of potential solutions. Amazon already owns the largest audiobook service on the Web in Audible, and it allows you to load and play back audiobooks from the service on the device. It'd be great if users could purchase and download audiobooks directly from the Kindle, but according to the company, the file sizes are too big to be downloaded over the device's network connection, so they have to be loaded from a PC.

But text-to-speech should still be available as an alternative. Why? Well, for a few reasons: firstly, in the short term, the vast majority of audiobook devotees are unlikely to ditch them for the emotionless text-to-speech of a computer. Secondly, I'd wager that enough people will be frustrated with the lackluster quality of text-to-speech that they'll shell out for the real deal. Finally, not every book gets turned into an audiobook in the first place, so why not let people listen to a book if it's something that wasn't going to be recorded anyway? Better yet, if the rights holders can negotiate a deal with Amazon to figure out which books are being read aloud the most, it can potentially take advantage of that to produce audiobook versions of titles that might otherwise not have merited the treatment.

I understand the need--both financial and psychological--for publishing companies and authors to make money off audio rights, but they need to learn from the lessons of the movie and music industries and realize that they stifle technological innovation at their own peril. Playing the long game is all well and good, but if they ignore adapting in the short term, there may not be much of a long term left.