The headquarters of the Authors Guild in New York City became a flash point for the debate over Amazon's Kindle 2 electronic reader today. Disability groups including the National Federation of the Blind staged a protest outside the building, calling on the Guild to reverse its stance on Kindle's text-to-speech feature, which reads e-books aloud. The Guild called the protest "unfortunate and unnecessary."

The Guild has criticized Kindle 2's text-to-speech feature, saying it encroaches on audio books without compensating copyright holders. That prompted Amazon to back down somewhat, saying it would allow authors and publishers to decide themselves whether to activate the read-aloud feature on individual titles. But the disability groups, which have organized themselves into a Reading Rights Coalition, are demanding full access to text-to-speech -- saying it gives the visually impaired equal access to electronic books.

Following today's protest, Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken responded with a statement that read, in part:

The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume.  Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights.

Knowing how difficult the road ahead is for the already fragile economics of authorship, we are particularly troubled at how all this arose, with Amazon attempting to use authors' audio rights to lengthen its lead in the fledgling e-book industry. We could not allow this rights grab to happen. Audio books are a billion dollar market, the rights for which are packaged separately from -- and are far more valuable than -- e-book rights.

Aiken added:

Today's protest is unfortunate and unnecessary. We stand by our offer, first made to the Federation's lawyer a month ago and repeated several times since, to negotiate in good faith to reach a solution for making in-print e-books accessible to everyone. We extend that same offer to any group representing the disabled.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind, said the coalition plans to make its case again at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books April 25 and 26.

[Photo courtesy National Federation of the Blind]

Here's a video report on the protest: