February 27 - 8:45pm EST   Amazon this evening said in a statement that the Kindle 2's text-to-speech feature for reading audiobooks will be strictly voluntary. The move will let individual book publishers decide whether or not individual titles can be read aloud by the e-book device and will change the book formatting to selectively disable the feature for those that object to it. The change follows objections from the Author's Guild which argued that the feature effectively violated the commercial rights of authors to charge separately for voiced editions of their books. [full story]

November 11 - 9:10am EST   SanDisk raised the stakes in its competition against the iPod shuffle and Creative ZEN Stone with a new, 8GB version of the Sansa Clip. The capacity gives it storage for up to 2,000 songs and doubles the capacity of Creative's best ultra-small models and quadruple that of Apple's. It continues to hold the same four-line OLED display that lets it have full control over music while still rendering it small enough to attach to a belt or clothes through its namesake hook. [full story]

April 21 - 2:25pm EDT   Dell will keep using Windows XP until as late as 2012, a company representative has reportedly told users. Although Microsoft has said it would discontinue the option for XP this year in all but very low-cost notebooks, the claimed Dell message says the PC creator will continue offering XP Professional until 2012 on all its higher-end business offerings, including the Latitude, Optiplex, and Precision lineups. [full story]

January 31 - 8:20am EST   Amazon today said it would acquire Audible in a share buyout deal worth roughly $300 million. The agreement effectively gives Amazon control of Audible's audiobook collection and is described as an effort to develop and expand the audiobook forrmat, which is largely dominated by the now-acquired company. The finished deal is expected to be approved sometime during the spring of this year. [full story]