As promised, Amazon has begun to implement the text to speech (TTS) flag that lets authors and their publishers turn off the "read it to me" feature of books on the Kindle. MobileRead members note that Toni Morrison's A Mercy and Stephen King's The Stand both have TTS disabled, and it seems to be on an author-by-author basis instead of by publisher or imprint.

There's nothing you can do about it, other than not buy any TTS-disabled books. If you come across titles with TTS disabled in the Amazon Kindle store, you might want to add a "no tts" tag to it as well, to help other customers quickly identify which authors are disabling this functionality.

"Kindle: Text-to-speech disabling has arrived " [MobileRead] (Thanks to Karl!)
(Photo: Lies Van Rompaey)