Following criticism by some authors, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is pulling back on the experimental Text-to-Speech feature in the new Kindle 2. Instead of making the automated reader available across the board, the company announced late Friday it will let rightsholders choose title by title. Amazon maintains that it has the right to offer Text-to-Speech, insisting “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.” 

But Amazon, which owns audiobook companies Audible and Brilliance, also admits: “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.” (The full statement is after the jump.)

The loudest shout may have been the Op-Ed by Authors Guild President Roy Blount, Jr., in the New York Times, Kindle’s bestselling newspaper partner. The Guild wants “a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.”

The company seems to have realized this isn’t a fight it wants to have—at least, now. Amazon is still building its Kindle library; today’s 240,000-plus titles are a huge leap from the start but not nearly what the company needs to come close to the breadth it offers in print. The automated feature itself is as rudimentary as the experimental web browser, with off-key pronunciation and little discretion. It’s a fun gimmick but not worth a major row. Here’s an example I recorded from Friday’s Washington Post MP3

Update: Professor Larry Lessig writes that Amazon is right to assert that it hasn’t broken any copyright laws—and wrong to cave into “bullies.” Lessig compares it to Adobe’s decision in 2001 to give rightsholders control over the audio function of its e-book technology, even if the works were in the public domain. That might have escaped much notice had it not not been for a publisher marking Alice in Wonderland as “this book cannot be read aloud.”

Lessig: “We’re worse off with the Kindle because if ... publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn’t given them—the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me—users and innovators have less freedom. And we may be worse off with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Books, because (in ways not clear when the settlement was first reported) the consequence of the class action mechanism may well disable users and innovators from doing what fair use plainly entitled Google to do.”