Shiro‘s doing awesome. She now weights 28 grams, incredibly energetic and jumps on top of Kuro all the time to assert her dominance. Yay! :)

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Have you seen Nalini‘s Angels' Blood cover? It's just awesome. It's out on March 3. I can't wait. :)

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Two industry insiders' view on Kindle's text-to-speech feature:

Neil Gaiman's position is that TTS is okay. Jason Pinter disagrees since TTS can potentially cannibalize audio sales. He quoted an interview with Robert B. Parker:

…what about an author who makes $60,000 a year, $10,000 of which comes from audio sales? What if, down the road, the Kindle cannibalizes his/her audio sales to the point where another contract is not offered? Audiobooks are more expensive to produce than print books and carry a higher price tag, so the author loses out on a certain dollar amount for every audio sale lost. Saying this issue is no big deal is like a politician claiming we're in a “mental recession” while riding in his private jet, unaware that below him there are people losing their homes. At some point perspective is lost, and while arguing dollars and cents may seem silly to some, to other it ceding this completely may at some point alter their career.

There have been other blogs and organizations stating their positions on TTS. But what I find singularly interesting is that most of pro-TTS people are telling authors to just hand over rights without getting compensated. I haven't seen a single pro-TTS people telling Amazon to cough up some dough and pay the authors for TTS.

BTW — IBM has TTS technology that sounds like a real human. So it is a very real possibility that something like Kindle TTS may replace audio books within years.

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This interview with Binky Urban just rocks. I love the part where she discusses McCormick.

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Nathan Bransford discusses sympathetic v. unsympathetic characters. Everyone should go read it. :)

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That's it! Do you have anything to share? Or discuss further? :)