Amazon has announced that it plans to cripple one of the features of the new Kindle 2, its text-to-speech feature, to avoid angering publishers wanting to sell audio books:

Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.

Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.

Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.

Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.

This is an unfortunate decision. Putting the publishers in the driver’s seat turns a potentially useful feature into one that’s likely to be confusing, only working on approved books.

The final edition of the Rocky Mountain News is captured in this Vimeo video.

After 149 years and 311 days, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition on February 27,

“Stop The Presses” now sounds pretty pathetic.

What newspaper do you think will go next?

In a bid to stay afloat in an industry in crisis, magazine and newspaper publishing giant Hearst Corp. is getting set to launch an “electronic reader” later this year, a device designed with periodical-reading in mind. Hearst publishes a number of titles, including magazines Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and newspaper The San Francisco Chronicle.

Fortune (at Money.CNN.com) quotes unnamed “industry insiders” as saying that the Hearst e-reader will have a large screen to accommodate the traditional layout of “dead-tree” newspapers and magazines. Hearst is rumored to be offering to share the device and its “underlying technology” with other publishers.

It is expected that the Hearst e-reader will use electronic “ink” like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. Not conincidentally, Hearst is already an investor in E Ink, the company which supplies the electronic ink technology to those and several other portable e-reader device makers. It is even possible that the reader will be foldable, to stash in a purse or briefcase, just like dead-tree publications.

Fortune speculates that Hearst will sell the devices to other publishers in return for a share in the revenue from magazine and newspaper sales the devices will generate. Sales of the e-reader device itself will not be a money-maker for the company, IT World says.

This new direction for electronic distribution of Hearst’s (and competitor-publishers’) titles comes at a critical time for the company. Just earlier this week, Hearst announced that, if they cannot cut expenses in the next few weeks, their landmark San Francisco Chronicle newspaper may close.

Simply moving Chronicle content online, and onto wireless e-readers, may not be enough. We pointed out earlier this week that fluffy gossip site Perez Hilton gets more traffic than the Chronicle, despite a great breadth and depth of news reporting there.

Newspapers and magazines are facing sharply declining advertising revenues, and decreases in circulation/subscription numbers. As the overall economy declines, readers and advertisers alike are shifting their attention and their business elsewhere.

Although Valleywag snarks that the new device is “the last stand of a doomed industry,” that readers won’t forsake their iPhones and netbooks in favor of Hearst’s e-reader, the sheer novelty and convenience of the new Hearst e-reader gizmo may, at least initially, garner a following.

Photo: Boston City Walk

VersatileMonkey.com has released PodTrapper for the popular Blackberry phone/portable media device. The PodTrapper is a podcatcher, or download manager and player of podcasts.

The $9.99 application allows users to consolidate podcasts a single device, rather than schlepping a Blackberry for phone and texting, and a separate portable media player for podcasts.

Simon Sage of IntoMobile has been using the PodTrapper podcatcher and says, it “isn’t what you’d call pretty, but it’s extremely practical, includes a large, categorized podcast directory, and above all, gets my podcasts over the air.”

PodTrapper features include:

• Automatic downloading of new episodes via Wifi (and soon via desktop app)
• Automatic downloading of new episodes via Cell network (On most carriers)
• Downloads via desktop application for those without Wifi or with difficult carriers
• Keeps track of last played podcast
• Remembers where you left off in every episode
• Reliable pause and resume of downloads when connectivity changes
• Built in keylock to allow for control of audio in your pocket
• “It Just Works, mostly, ” say the application’s creators.

Information about a 30 day free trial of PodTrapper can be found here.

The Commons Video is a 3 minute 46 second animation (licensed under CC BY), making the case for an expansive conception of “The Commons” as a means to achieve a society of justice and equality.

From the video’s description:

In a just world, the idea of wealth–be it money derived from the work of human hands, the resources and natural splendor of the planet itself–and the knowledge handed down through generations belongs to all of us. But in our decidedly unjust and imperfect world, our collective wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. There is be a better way–the notion of the commons–common land, resources, knowledge–is a common-sense way to share our natural, cultural, intellectual riches.

As we see the music industry turned on its head, newspapers dying, Monty Python making money by giving away their funny bits and bloggers getting more views than major news organizations, its seems that the changes introduced by the Internet are catching up with us.

People aren’t going to pay for what they can get for free – so learning how to navigate the Creative Commons is becoming more and more vital to new media and our culture.

via Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

Today Creative Commons announced that they are looking for summer interns to work in their San Francisco offices:

CC’s popular summer internship positions are now posted on the Opportunities page! We are looking for motivated students who can spend the summer at the San Francisco office to work with the staff on various projects. This year, we are offering technology, legal, international outreach, and graphic design/media development positions. Please spread the word to qualified students, or apply yourself! We are accepting applications now through March 13th.

CC is looking for college (or graduate school) students, to intern for ten weeks, June through August. Interns do general office work, as well as “more focused projects.” More information is on the CC Opportunities page.

The sight of workers with smudgy foreheads yesterday when I was downtown reminded me that it was Ash Wednesday, and the beginning of the Lenten season which leads up to Easter.

The Catholic Online website reports that Massachusetts-based blogger and musician, Susan Bailey, is publishing a daily podcast during the forty days of Lent.

“Theosis” is a series of daily devotions hosted by Fr. Seraphim Beshoner, a history professor at Franciscan University. The five (or so) minute podcasts do not follow the daily readings of the Roman (Catholic) Lectionary for the scripture readings, but are inspired, rather, by the Eastern (Byzantine) Church.

Beshoner also hosts the “Catholic: Under The Hood” podcast.

The blog and podcast are here.

The New York Times jokes that CBS is “taking the iPhone where no iPhone has gone before.”  The announcement must be the inspiration for a million bad Star Trek jokes, but today, CBS Interactive released an iPhone application for its TV.com site. The new application lets users view full episodes of TV series, ranging from C.S.I. to the original Star Trek, on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

Other video sites, like Hulu, which is owned by NBC and Fox, makes content available only to viewers with web-connected computers.  As Steve Donohue at Contentinople points out, the (Adobe) Flash-based player on  Hulu precludes content from that site being played over the iPhone, the G1, and many other portable media players (which don’t accommodate Flash).

The CBS/TV.com application can stream full episodes to the iPhone or iPod Touch over both the cellular phone network and via WiFi.  Streamed episodes have advertising inserted in them, but somehow they seem less interruptive than the ones I’ve encountered in the middle of shows, watching via Hulu on my computer.

The CBS Interactive TV.com application for the iPhone and iPod Touch is free, and is available through the iTunes App Store.

I’m not a fan of gossip sites, but Perez Hilton is a force of nature to be reckoned with.

Yesterday, Perez Hilton (Mario Armando Lavandeira) announced that his site had its busiest day ever – getting an astounding 13.9 million page views in one day.

Meanwhile, the Hearst corporation announced huge layoffs at the San Francisco Chronicle:

Hearst Corporation announced today that its San Francisco Chronicle newspaper is undertaking critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and nonunion employees. If these savings cannot be accomplished within weeks, Hearst said, the Company will be forced to sell or close the newspaper.

The reductions could results in hundreds losing their jobs.

Think these announcements aren’t connected?

Then check out this graph, via Alexa, comparing the reach of the two organizations online:

Perez Hilton’s site – basically a pop and pop operation – consistently reaches more people online than the San Francisco Chronicle’s site, created by an organization with hundreds of employees and the backing of a multimedia conglomerate.

The Internet has radically changed the economics of news.

Newspapers are going to have to learn from Hilton, and other new media powerhouses, if they want to survive.

via Ryan Spoon

Nationally syndicated radio show host Adam Carolla was recently, unceremoniously, fired when the station he broadcast from, Los Angeles’ KLSX 97.1 FM, changed its format to a pop music station.

Declaring that terrestrial radio is “heading for the sh*tter,” Carolla has launched a free daily (Monday – Friday) podcast.

“For now, it’ll be very stripped down and barebones, but with the help of fans like yourselves, there’s no reason we can’t grow this into a full fledged production,” Carolla says on his podcast site.  “There’s no subscription fee, and I am not asking for compensation for this podcast. The only payment I ask is, if you like what you hear, you pass it on to others, and together we can launch our own pirate ship.”

The first episode was published Monday. It is bare-bones, with no music, no other people, and a lot of profanity (which would not have been possible on terrestrial syndicated radio). By Tuesday, (according to Carolla) “in less than 24 hours, the first podcast was downloaded over a quarter of a million times, which is awesome.”

While one can wonder whether Carolla would have ever gotten into podcasting had it not been for the rude push provided by 97.1’s format change, Carolla — and his listeners — seemed to have embraced the medium whole-heartedly.

On his first episode, Carolla appeals to his listeners: “We’ll do it in a grassroots way, with an eye on high tech… I don’t want your money, I just want your ears….

“I want your feedback. I want you to tell me what you want to hear, what you don’t want to hear…. I’m like a shark that needs to swim forward, and I don’t have any water in the tank…. Tell me what you want me to talk about…. You put it up there, I’ll do it, we’ll find it together, we’ll do it together.

“I really think we’re on the brink of something…. I’m in it for the big picture, for the long term. I don’t need to make any money. Not for awhile. I wanna build. I wanna build the community, here.”

The podcast website is here, and the RSS feed is here.

Photo: ABC Images